[HN Gopher] I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
___________________________________________________________________
I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
Author : rpgbr
Score : 1112 points
Date : 2025-11-14 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manualdousuario.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (manualdousuario.net)
| WD-42 wrote:
| Nobody ever wants anything in Firefox, but in this case it's
| probably especially true.
| cedilla wrote:
| People want a lot of stuff in Firefox. However, people also
| seem to neatly bin all features into either "obviously
| necessary part of a web browser" and "obviously extraneous
| nonsense" when what they really mean is "things I personally
| want" and "things I personally don't want".
| everdrive wrote:
| Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of
| navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally
| speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine
| as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of
| resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Does anyone want AI in anything?
|
| Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online
| bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program.
| They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't
| like it either, but that's the reality.
| smlavine wrote:
| > They're all using it.
|
| Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for
| Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have
| typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face,
| but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI
| (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a
| tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be
| resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the
| internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to
| happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a
| fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine
| interest in or excitement by the technology.
| gbear605 wrote:
| If I talk to the people I know who don't spend all their time
| online, they're just not using AI. Quite a few of my close
| friends haven't used AI even once in any way, and most of the
| rest tried it out once and didn't really care for it. They're
| busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with
| their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
| vidarh wrote:
| Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche
| activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very
| small number of books which does not translate to people
| being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their
| time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a
| rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all
| in bubbles.
| coldpie wrote:
| I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on
| Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product
| summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have
| any further suggestions for refinishing her table top
| beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my
| coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM
| summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a
| friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove
| a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker
| tells me about the thing she learned about from the
| generated summary of a YouTube video.
|
| We can take principled stands against these things, and I
| do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the
| reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is
| using it.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > They're all using it, all the time, for everything
|
| Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a
| "super-online bubble"
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-
| technical people think it's another thing they have to learn
| and do not want to (except for those who have been
| conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is
| _not_ a picture of mental health or stability for anyone).
| They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be
| urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices.
|
| They are already preached at that they need a new phone or
| laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform
| that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now
| similarly for their word processors and everything.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I've polled about this (informally) as well.
|
| This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they
| eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they
| still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're
| not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are
| using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even
| know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image
| editing, and conversation prompts all get a _ton_ of use.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Only if you are assuming I am asking so directly...
| Adrig wrote:
| My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so
| who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I
| thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will
| become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything
| meaningful.
| everdrive wrote:
| It could be something of an historical return to form; a
| small class of properly educated people and then the wider,
| semi-literate masses.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm "properly educated" by most definitions, 95% of web
| pages are garbage and a summary is fine. Also I imagine
| you frequently read summaries of books and movies and
| many other things before deciding to read or watch the
| entire work.
| everdrive wrote:
| >95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine.
|
| Mmm, summarized garbage.
|
| >Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books
|
| This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however.
| Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie
| trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with
| books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or
| review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an
| LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Communicating in pictographs
| ponector wrote:
| That should be a next step. It takes too much time to
| read summary. So the result should be a summary picture!
| Text based image generation is quite good now. How would
| you call this chatgpt feature?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Gotta love them emojis
| mghackerlady wrote:
| If someone wanted to do this for whatever reason, there's
| actually a language that can be written exclusively in
| emojis. It's called toki pona, and while emojis aren't
| the standard writing system, there have been several
| proposals. It works well since toki pona has a very small
| syntax (only around ~150 words iirc)
| vidarh wrote:
| There is plenty of text for which a good summary will have
| a far higher ratio of meaning to words than the original.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Did you write a comment like this last time a recipe
| clipper got posted here?
| nunez wrote:
| Loads of people are Google's AI Summaries; it's the first
| result, so, hard to miss.
| mabedan wrote:
| I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts
| which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often,
| mostly summarization related.
| rwmj wrote:
| How do you know its summaries are correct?
| Quothling wrote:
| You already know that they aren't. Yesterday my wife and I
| were discussing Ronja Roverdatter. When we were kids it
| used to have danish talk over, so you could still hear the
| original swedish sound as well. Now it has been dubbed, and
| we were talking about the actor who voices Birk. Anyway, we
| looked him up and found out he was in Blinkende Lygter,
| which neither of us remebered. So we asked Gemini and it
| told us he played the child flashback actor of the main
| character... except he doesn't, and to make matters worse,
| Gemini said that he played Christian a young Torkil... So
| it even got the names wrong. Sure this isn't exactly
| something Gemini would know, considering Ronja Roverdatter
| is an old Astrid Lingren novel that was turned to film
| decades ago, and Blinkende Lygter is a Danish movie from
| 20ish years ago where Sebastian Jessen plays a tiny role.
| Since they are prediction engines though, they'll happily
| give you a wrong answer because that's what the math added
| up to.
|
| I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our
| Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional
| needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't
| usually matter.
|
| For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the
| content of it is something you're interested in watching.
| Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90%
| of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info
| you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form
| content or not.
| vidarh wrote:
| For most things it doesn't matter, as long as its usually
| correct _enough_ , and "enough" is a pretty low bar for a
| lot of things.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has
| error bounds appropriate for my situation?
| vidarh wrote:
| > Can you give an example?
|
| Recipe pages full of fluff.
|
| Review pages full of fluff.
|
| Almost _any_ web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly
| rising proportion.
|
| > And how would I know the LLM has error bounds
| appropriate for my situation?
|
| You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then
| you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense
| when reading the summaries, just the same as when
| considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is
| this a real question?
| novemp wrote:
| Most recipe blogs have a "skip to recipe" button because
| they know you don't care.
| vidarh wrote:
| Enough don't.
| novemp wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has a great tool for dealing with those ones:
| "Block this site from all results".
| vidarh wrote:
| That doesn't get me their content.
| novemp wrote:
| Why would you reward those sites with clicks? Just go to
| the sites that actually respect your time.
| kemayo wrote:
| "Get me the recipe from this page" feels like a place
| where I do _really_ care that it gets it right, because
| in an unfamiliar recipe it doesn 't take much
| hallucination around the ingredients to ruin the dish.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I guess I never come across that situation because I just
| don't engage with sources that fluff. That is a good
| example, but presumably, there should be no errors there
| because it's just stripping away unnecessary stuff?
| Although, you would have to trust the LLM doesn't get rid
| of or change a key step in the process, which I still
| don't feel comfortable trusting.
|
| I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for
| a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict
| its result to a single web page.
| ponector wrote:
| How do you know they want a correct summary? AI slop is
| good enough, acceptable for many people.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| What is the use of such a summary?
| vidarh wrote:
| Determining whether something is worth reading doesn't
| require a good summary, just one that contains enough
| relevant snippets to give a decent indication.
|
| The opportunity cost of "missing out" on reading a page
| you're unsure enough about to want a summary of is not
| likely to be high, and similarly it doesn't matter much
| if you end up reading a few paragraphs before you realise
| you were misled.
|
| There are very few tasks where we absolutely must have
| accurate information all the time.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I've done some summarizing with my own small Tcl/Tk-based
| frontend that uses llama.cpp to call Mistral Small (i.e.
| all is done locally) and i do know that it can be off about
| various things.
|
| However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an
| accurate summary but because i come across some overly long
| article that i do not even know if i'm interested in
| reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give
| me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then
| judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or
| not.
|
| For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct,
| just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all
| about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the
| summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it
| does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect,
| the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some
| article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd
| do without the summary anyway since because i need to run
| my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a
| few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the
| thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in
| already biased against reading.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add
| something to this discussion.
|
| How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?
|
| To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries
| to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for
| deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means
| actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that
| method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article.
| And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the
| article says from a headline.
|
| So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are
| correct enough for the purpose they serve.
| garciansmith wrote:
| You can make a better decision if you have the context of
| the actual thing you are reading, both in terms of how
| it's presented (the non-textual aspects of a webpage for
| instance) and the language used. You can get a sense of
| who the intended audience might be, what their biases
| might be, how accurate this might be, etc. By using a
| summarizing tool all that is lost, you give up using your
| own faculties to understand and judge, and instead you
| put your trust in a third party which uses its own
| language, has its own biases, etc.
|
| Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there
| become slop, does any of this matter?
| azinman2 wrote:
| What are you constantly summarizing?
| mabedan wrote:
| Articles. Some articles I fully read, some others I just
| read the headline, and some others I want to spend 2
| minutes reading the summary to know whether I want to read
| the full thing.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to
| find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers
| you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never
| asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited
| by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter
| churning just until you can click "Disable" on the model.
| RansomStark wrote:
| In firefox yeah! I use it often.
|
| I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama
| and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants
| to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting
| to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information,
| and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on
| steroids.
|
| The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in
| electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also
| used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the
| graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small
| amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have
| a gaming rig laying around
| distances wrote:
| Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local
| only models that allow you to use your own existing services.
| Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to
| Ollama?
| RansomStark wrote:
| Use openwebui with ollama.
|
| Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
|
| So grab ollama and your prefered model.
|
| Install openwebui.
|
| Connect openwebui to ollama
|
| Then in firwdox open about:config
|
| And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui
| instance
|
| Google suggests the you might also need to set
| browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember
| having to do that
| RansomStark wrote:
| Docs here:
| https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-
| si...
|
| I think its technically experiemntal, but ive been using
| this since day one with no issue
| rpdillon wrote:
| The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The
| only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and
| it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/
| RansomStark wrote:
| My mistake, I left a step out. Use openwebui with ollama.
| Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
|
| So grab ollama and your prefered model, install openwebui.
|
| Then open about:config
|
| And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui
| instance
|
| Google suggests the you might also need to set
| browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember
| having to do that
| kbelder wrote:
| An AI specifically customized to pull the recipe out of long
| rambling cooking blog posts would be great. I'd use that
| regularly.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| that's not "AI" that's just a basic firefox extension, and
| one that's trivially easy to search for
|
| literally googles first hit for me: https://www.reddit.com/
| r/Cooking/comments/jkw62b/i_developed...
| jmkni wrote:
| I agree
|
| I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but
| can fuck off otherwise
|
| Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though
| shevy-java wrote:
| That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try
| to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable
| the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not
| given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I
| actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that
| Google AI spam. That extension works better than those
| "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox
| so I can not even want to be bothered to install an
| installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from
| Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice.
| The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said
| since years that we, the people, need back control over the
| world wide web. That includes the UI.
| jve wrote:
| > Does anyone want AI in anything?
|
| I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines,
| transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct
| teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where
| mistakes can easily be corrected)
|
| Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It
| HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people
| couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can
| tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on
| which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
|
| https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
| boplicity wrote:
| Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of
| accessibility, and seems to be something people universally
| want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when
| it _is_ LLM software creating the captions. There are many
| more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into
| our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
| bildung wrote:
| Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai
| captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they
| are _really_ bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but
| still.
|
| On second thought this probably depends on the caption
| language.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There are projects that will run Whisper or another
| transcription service locally on your computer, which has
| great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to
| use their highest quality transcription models on
| YouTube, maybe due to cost.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription
| of many hours of audio on a daily basis.
|
| For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff
| I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a
| somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced
| with others.
|
| When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might
| misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition
| system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the
| misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several
| words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio
| syntactically with the mistaken word.
|
| Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise
| was but the rest of the transcription would be
| unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words
| that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at
| the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic
| similarity that created the initial error. The following
| words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Try Parakeet, it's more state of the art these days.
| There are others too like Meta's omnilingual one.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Ah yes, one of the standard replies whenever anyone
| mentions a way that an AI thing fails: "You're still
| using [X]? Well of course, that's not state of the art,
| you should be using [Y]."
|
| You don't actually state whether you believe Parakeet is
| susceptible to the same class of mistakes...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I haven't seen those issues myself in my usage, it's just
| a suggestion, no need to be sarcastic about it.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| It's an extremely common goalpost-moving pattern on HN,
| and it adds little to the conversation without actually
| addressing how or whether the outcome would be better.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Try it, or don't. Due to the nature of generative AI,
| what might be an issue for me might not be an issue for
| you, especially if we have differing use cases, so no one
| can give you the answer you seek except for yourself.
| delecti wrote:
| I'm not going to defend the youtube captions as good, but
| even still, I find them incredibly helpful. My hearing is
| fine, but my processing is rubbish, and having a visual
| aid to help contextualize the sound is a big help, even
| when they're a bit wrong.
|
| Your point about the caption language is probably right
| though. It's worse with jargon or proper names, and worse
| with non-American English speakers. If we they don't even
| get right all the common accents of English, I have
| little hope for other languages.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically
| with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily
| depends on implied rather than explicit context.
|
| The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a
| verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the
| subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the
| more formal/polite you get, the more things are added.
| You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot."
| But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be
| interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)
|
| Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less
| about how it's structured.
|
| Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube
| includes a human-provided translation as captions.
| Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up
| entirely.
| freehorse wrote:
| I assume people talk about transcription, not
| translation. Translation in youtube ime is indeed
| horrible in all languages I have tried, but transcription
| in english is good enough to be useful. However, the more
| technical jargon a video uses, the worse transcription is
| (translation is totally useless in anything technical
| there).
| belorn wrote:
| Automatic transcription in English heavily depend on
| accent, sound quality, and how well the speaker is
| articulating. It will often mistake words that sound
| alike to make non-sensible sentences, randomly skip
| words, or just inserts random words for no clear reason.
|
| It does seem to do a few clever things. For lyrics it
| seem to first look for existing transcribed lyrics before
| making their own guesses (Timing however can be quite bad
| when it does this). Outside of that, AI transcribed
| videos is like an alien who has read a book on a dead
| language and is transcribing based on what the book say
| that the word should sound like phonetically. At times
| that can be good enough.
|
| (A note on sound quality. It not the perceived quality.
| Many low res videos has perfectly acceptable, if somewhat
| lossy sound quality, but the transcriber goes insane. It
| likes prefer 1080p videos with what I assume much higher
| bit-rate for the sound.)
| Kiro wrote:
| Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a
| common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not
| reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another
| "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but
| would love to be proven wrong.
| meatmanek wrote:
| Captions seem to have been updated sometime between 7 and
| 15 months ago. Here's a reddit post from 7 months ago
| noticing the update: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/com
| ments/1kd9210/autocaptio...
|
| and here's Jeff Geerling 15 months ago showing how to use
| Whisper to make dramatically better captions:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M9NOtusM8
|
| I assume Google has finally put some of their multimodal
| LLM work to good use. Before that, they were
| embarrassingly bad.
| Sophira wrote:
| To be clear, it's _not_ LLMs creating the captions.
| Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a
| speech recognition model, not a large language model. It 's
| trained on _audio_ , not text, and it can run on your
| mobile phone.
|
| It's still AI, of course. But there _is_ distinction
| between it and an LLM.
|
| [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-
| card.md
| big_toast wrote:
| It's an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio
| (language?) and transcription.
|
| Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a
| tautological way even if it's not the typical sense or
| doesn't tend to be used for autoregressive token
| generation?
| uoaei wrote:
| Is it Transformer-based? If not then it's a different
| beast architecturally.
|
| Audio models tend to be based more on convolutional
| layers than Transformers in my experience.
| big_toast wrote:
| The openai/whisper repo and paper referenced by the model
| card seem to be saying it's transformer based.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Whisper is a great random word generator when you use it
| on italian!
| janalsncm wrote:
| Whisper is an encoder decoder transformer. The input is
| audio spectrograms, the output is text tokens. It is an
| improvement over old school transcription methods because
| it's trained on audio transcripts, so it makes
| contextually plausible predictions.
|
| Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it's
| indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a
| close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more
| important question is how these things are used in the
| UX. Decoders don't have to be annoying, that is a product
| choice.
| Muromec wrote:
| For a few days now Im getting super cringe robot voice
| force dubbing every youtube video in Dutch. I use it
| without being logged in and hate it a lot.
|
| Subtitles are good zo
| belorn wrote:
| I doubt that people prefer automatic capitations over human
| made, no more than people prefer AI subtitles. The big AI
| subtitle controversy going on right now in anime
| demonstrate well that quite a lot is lost in translation
| when an AI is guessing what words are most likely in a
| situation, compared to a human making a translation.
|
| What people want is something that is better than nothing,
| and in that sense I can see how automatic captions is
| transformative in terms of accessibility.
| gspencley wrote:
| ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of
| the oldest examples.
|
| These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is
| usually talking about large language models, or generative
| adversarial neural networks for things like image generation
| etc.
|
| Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long
| predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too,
| don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now
| is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs
| into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs,
| I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any
| more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god
| companies have finally gotten the message about "smart
| appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but
| for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin'
| dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of
| other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required
| or desired by most customers.
| allan_s wrote:
| 3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for
| you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local
| website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able
| to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish ,
| but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than
| happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when
| I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those
| irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate
| something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel
| physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this
| contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we
| purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess
| what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-
| crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the
| same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp!
| So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing
| the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you
| get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing
| something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech
| professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep
| feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into
| nothing be damned!
| nerdjon wrote:
| Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing
| around AI.
|
| I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was
| invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch
| screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem
| is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI"
| left and right.
|
| That being said I think what most people think of when they say
| "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It
| has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to
| be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the
| background.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said..
|
| But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned
| into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is
| getting harder and harder to read an article about
| something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a
| custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it
| throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
|
| They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just
| say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very
| specific about what we are talking about.
| cratermoon wrote:
| For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative
| AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced
| that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever
| OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that
| is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my
| language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation
| system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean,
| and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV.
| I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not
| before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of
| "AI" in a serious or positive way.
| krick wrote:
| > 3-6 months
|
| Wow, you are an optimist. I do feel "it's close", but I
| wouldn't bet this close. But I wouldn't argue either, I
| don't know. Also, when it really pops, the consequences
| will be more disastrous than the bubble itself feels
| right now. It's literally hundreds of billions in
| circular investing. It's absurd.
| j4coh wrote:
| They need to show usage going up and to the right or the
| house of cards falls apart. So now you're forced to use it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is why I use the term "genAI" rather than "AI" when
| talking about things like LLMs, sora, etc.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I think companies should also advertise when they use
| JavaScript on the page. "Use this new feature --- why?
| Because it's powered by JavaScript"
| krick wrote:
| > what used to be just called ML
|
| FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket
| calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I
| only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue
| with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since.
| When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword,
| same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved
| of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing
| (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded
| values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end
| user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT,
| you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not
| meaningfully different from what was running on your old
| pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one
| actually knows what it does.
|
| So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now,
| but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more.
| Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale,
| of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable
| people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| "AI" is the only term that makes sense for end users
| because "AI" is the only term that is universally
| understood. Hackernews types tend to overlook the layman.
|
| And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an
| inaccurate term because _it 's not_. That's exactly what we
| are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to
| describing the implementation, and, honestly, _what
| difference does it make_ for most people using it.
|
| It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high
| level in most contexts.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Right, it should be invisible to the user. Those formerly-
| called-ML features are useful. They do a very specific,
| limited function, and "Just Work."
|
| What I definitively don't want, yet it's what is currently
| happening, is a chatbot crammed into every single app and
| then shoved down your throat.
| andy99 wrote:
| The existence of the features doesn't bother me. It's the
| constant nagging about them. I can't use a google product
| without being harassed to the point of not being able to work
| by offers to "help me write" or whatever.
|
| Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The
| problem is the confluence of new features now becoming
| possible, and companies no longer building software for their
| users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we're seeing
| this in action.
| vidarh wrote:
| The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press
| on the power button on Android, and you can change what it
| does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
| ortusdux wrote:
| My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored
| into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was
| disappointing.
| LtWorf wrote:
| On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off
| button being able to shut off the telephone.
|
| I can only hope they won't change it back at the next
| update (already happened once).
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to
| something else that's not power options.
|
| Just to push their annoying google assistant
| seszett wrote:
| What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't
| install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Some phones with the lastest android, when you press the
| power button instead of showing you the power options, it
| opens google assistant.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Apple did the same shit, long press of the power button
| opens up Siri.
| amarant wrote:
| Clippy really is back
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Clippy was predictable, free, and didn't steal your data.
| netsharc wrote:
| Someone should write a browser extension that changes AI
| buttons in websites to Clippy.
|
| Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was
| compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions.
|
| LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get
| trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and
| downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the
| hope that they will eventually become good enough to
| replace the very people they trained them.
|
| The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products
| as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that,
| like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the
| byproduct of humans.
|
| If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end
| of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it
| because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at
| the peak is a net positive for everyone.
|
| That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are
| bad in their own way.
| thih9 wrote:
| > I can't use a google product without being harassed (...)
|
| You can disable AI in Google products.
|
| E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all
| settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find
| Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.
|
| Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322
| cwillu wrote:
| And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down
| another setting in another month when they stuff it into
| another workflow I don't want it in?
| infermore wrote:
| guess we'll see in a month
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication,
| it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up
| nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit
| "No"
| tracker1 wrote:
| YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the
| movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in
| the general YouTube results... I like historical content,
| but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.
| netsharc wrote:
| Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me
| "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up
| your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a
| subscription fee?]".
| bobsoap wrote:
| Every time I _open_ Google Photos, it does this. Every
| single time. It 's insanely hostile.
| robocat wrote:
| My iPhone has a permanent red badge counter trying to get
| me to upgrade to iCloud. I've moved the settings icon so
| I don't see it normally, but it is nagging. There's other
| dark patterns used by Apple to try and increase their
| income by "asking" me to pay more.
| Maken wrote:
| Every time you update? How about Maps asking if you want
| to use advanced location every time you open it?
| mghackerlady wrote:
| What's even worse is that every time you sign into a
| google account without a phone number or home address
| associated with it, it screams at you to add them for
| sECurItY
| thih9 wrote:
| Depends; in the EU and selected countries that setting
| was always opt-in (i.e. it was never enabled for you).
| Elsewhere I guess the user has to periodically check
| their settings, or privacy policies, etc, which in
| practice sounds impossible.
|
| > Important: By default, smart feature settings are off
| if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan,
| Switzerland, United Kingdom
|
| (same source as in grandparent comment).
| cwillu wrote:
| Then no, I can't use a google product without being
| harassed, unless I live in a limited selection of blessed
| countries.
| Muromec wrote:
| welcome to not being a passport bro for a change. Thats
| how mostbof the world feels when another cool thing
| happens, but the other way around
| thih9 wrote:
| Note that these countries blessed themselves via legal
| steps (EU ones at least) and are not blessed by Google.
| ufocia wrote:
| I prefer opt-in vs. opt-out. Opt-out is pretentious and
| patronizing.
| andy99 wrote:
| I have everything disabled for my personal account. For
| work, when I looked into it, it had to be disabled
| centrally by my company.
| natebc wrote:
| It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example:
| Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old)
| Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail
| interface. ONE checkbox in the sea of gmail options?
| dgacmu wrote:
| This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives
| you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you
| end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as
| the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail.
| It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way
| to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any
| of the features that will make most people not want to turn
| it off because of the collateral damage"
|
| (I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email
| threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam
| filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
| strange_quark wrote:
| This toggle _still_ doesn't turn off all the bs.
|
| Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a
| summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which
| is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI
| to move around after the document is opened. The other
| day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits
| PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical
| benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is
| that I can get an ID card with an online account... not
| the various plan deductibles or anything useful like
| that.
|
| I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that
| changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the
| UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want
| a summary instead of generating it automatically.
| SECProto wrote:
| Note that this setting (only accessible from desktop) also
| blocks spellcheck, a feature that absolutely does not need
| AI to implement
| cornholio wrote:
| > no longer building software for their users but as vehicles
| to push some agenda
|
| All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda
| always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent
| extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power
| maximization for their owners and executives.
|
| The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down
| everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the
| technology as having huge potential to advance the above
| agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their
| detriment.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > All companies push an agenda all the time, and their
| agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly
| and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets,
| power maximization for their owners and executives.
|
| I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut.
| How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of
| that?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true.
| For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateR
| ange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts
| from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on
| corporate monopolies and power in the US).
|
| https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about
|
| > The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A
| monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets
| the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark
| Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking.
| Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And
| today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big
| markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and
| shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting
| software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American
| industries are more consolidated today than they were
| decades ago.
|
| > Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They
| raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural
| areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don't focus
| on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to
| protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle,
| and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which
| results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates
| monopolies, and why we've hated them for hundreds of
| years.
|
| https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-
| theory-o... (Food consolidation)
|
| https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-
| cont... (Media consolidation)
|
| https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-
| utilitie... (US electric utilities)
|
| https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture
| consolidation)
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-
| acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That geographic concentration is a real thing.
|
| I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are
| based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with
| people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI _every frickin
| ' day_ and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma
| [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI
| features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate.
| [2]
|
| I'd really like to see Mozilla move _anywhere_ but the
| bay area, whether that is Dublin or Denver. When you aren
| 't hanging out with "big tech" people at lunch and after
| work and when you have to get in a frickin' airplane to
| meet with those people you might start to "think
| different" and get some empathy for users and produce a
| better product and be a viable business as opposed to
| another out-of-touch and unaccountable NGO.
|
| [1] Clayton Christensen pointed out in _The Innovator 's
| Dilemma_ that companies like Kodak and Xerox die because
| they are focused on the needs of their current customers
| who could care less about the new shiny that can't
| satisfy their needs now but will be superior in say 15
| years. Now we have _The FOMO Dilemma_ which is best
| illustrated by Windows 8 which went in a bold direction
| (tabletization) that users were completely indifferent
| to: firms now introduce things that their existing
| customers hate because they read _The Innovator 's
| Dilemma_ and don't want to wind up like Xerox.
|
| [2] we use Firefox because we hate that corporate
| garbage.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub,
| with some component of their funding coming from the EU,
| where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state
| efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not a popular opinion but if I was the EU I would do
| the following:
|
| (1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a
| 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we
| know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip
| something bad in)
|
| (2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the
| c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly
| revenue"
|
| (3) same for having a cookie banner
| paradox460 wrote:
| Europe had a potential Mozilla: Opera. They let it
| flounder and Chinese investors bought it.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I liked the original Opera--it's been a while, but I
| think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, _long_
| time ago--but I'm not sure they were ever a "potential
| Mozilla," at least in the way I would interpret that.
| They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by
| a for-profit company.
|
| (Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway,
| which is not a member of the European Union.)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What stops the EU from doing that now?
|
| Regulation.
| flaburgan wrote:
| Wrong. They are actually doing it, with NLNet and NGI
| (Next Generation Internet) but they chose to funs Servo
| not Firefox.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Bob the Barber ain't doin shit but that's mostly because
| he's got a room temperature IQ and is already struggling
| with taxes and biz-dev. he can do a mean fade, tho.
|
| some weeks if its slow he may struggle to make his rent
| for his apartment; he doesn't have time or capacity to
| engage in serious rent-seeking behavior.
|
| but hair cut chains like Supercuts are absolutely
| engaging in shady behavior all the time, like games with
| how solons rent chairs or employing questionably legal
| trafficked workers.
|
| and FYI turns out that Supercuts a wholly owned
| subsidiary of the Regis Corporation, who absolutely
| acquires other companies and plays all sorts of shady
| corporate games, including branching into other markets
| and monopoly efforts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_Corporation
| pstuart wrote:
| I would subscribe to your newsletter ;-)
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| The statement, more refined, would clarify, "publicly
| traded companies".
| amelius wrote:
| > All companies push an agenda all the time, and their
| agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly
| and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets,
| power maximization for their owners and executives.
|
| But if users really wanted agenda-free products and
| services, then those would win right? At least according to
| free market theory.
| cornholio wrote:
| Sure, if the common denominator user is at least as savvy
| as the entire marketing and strategy departments of these
| trillion dollar companies, then sure, users will identify
| products that are not designed according to their best
| interests and will then perfectly coordinate their
| purchases so that such products fail in the marketplace.
| Sure.
| isodev wrote:
| > according to free market theory
|
| Not once in the history of tech "the free market" has
| succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots
| of money from doing something they want.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I'm actually leaning towards the above comment being
| satire, it's hard to believe anyone on HN could believe
| in a free market in 2025.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| This is yet again confusing a free market with an
| unregulated one. A free market is a market, where all
| costs are included (no external costs), so that market
| participants can make free decisions that will lead to
| the best outcome. To price in all external costs,
| regulation is needed.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Maybe in the long term, but not necessarily in the short
| term.
| autoexec wrote:
| One of the problems with that idea is that sometimes it
| will be far more profitable to refuse to give consumers
| what they want and because eventually making the most
| amount of money possible becomes the only thing that
| matters to a company, what users want gets ignored and
| users are forced to settle for whats available.
| danudey wrote:
| 1. AI is generating a lot of buzz
|
| 2. AI could be the next technology revolution
|
| 3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on
| the ground floor
|
| 4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being
| left behind
|
| 5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure
| we're seeing return on our investment
|
| 6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could
| possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the
| feature
|
| 7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're
| offering so we should opt them in automatically
|
| Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in.
| See also: 'stories' making their way into everything
| (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form
| videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is
| that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of
| billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and
| the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for
| entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge
| percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI
| accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out
| something like ten percent of GDP.
|
| So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual
| 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see
| any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out
| for them somehow, for some reason.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| It's also worth noting that non AI investment has
| basically dried up, so anyone wanting that initial
| investment needs to use the buzzwords.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| In the 90s I did a lot of AI research but we weren't
| allowed to call it AI because if you used that label your
| funding would instantly be cancelled. After this bubble
| pops we'll no doubt return to that situation. Sigh.
| exographicskip wrote:
| Great breakdown. I'm starting to think I'd pay to disable
| AI in most products.
|
| Similar to how I read about a bar in the UK that has an
| intentional Faraday cage to encourage people to interact
| with people in the real world.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This sounds great actually. It seems like a fantastic
| revenue opportunity. We can add mandatory AI to all our
| products. We can then offer a basic plan that removes AI
| from most products, except in-demand ones. To remove it
| their you'll need the premium plan. There's a discount
| for annual subscription. You can also get the "Friends
| and Family" plan that covers 12 devices, but is region
| locked. If you go too far from your domicile, the AI
| comes back. This helps keep user indoors, streaming, and
| watching ads. Business plans will have the option to
| disable AI if their annual bill exceeds a certain amount.
| We can align this amount such that encourages typical
| business accounts to grow by a modest percent each year.
| We'll do this by setting the amount low enough that
| businesses are incentived to purchase but also high
| enough that they windup buying significant services from
| us. This potentially allows us to sell them services they
| don't need or that don't even exist, as the demand for AI
| free products is projected to rise in a 2-10 year
| timeframe.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > where they don't see any way out but to keep going and
| hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
|
| That's the core issue. No one wants to fail early or fail
| fast anymore. It's "lets stick to our guns and push this
| thing hard and far until it actually starts working for
| us."
|
| Sometimes the time just isn't right for a particular
| technology. You put it out there, try for a little bit,
| and if it fails, it fails. Move on.
|
| You don't keep investing in your failure while telling
| your users "You think you don't want this, but trust us,
| you actually do."
| moregrist wrote:
| > The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI
| down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the
| technology as having huge potential to advance the above
| agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their
| detriment.
|
| I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic)
| explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird
| power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing
| that Salesforce and Adobe want to advance an agenda other
| than selling product and giving their C-suite nice bonuses.
|
| I think you can explain a lot of this as:
|
| 1. Executives (CEOs, CTOs, VPs, whatever) got convinced
| that AI is the new growth thing
|
| 2. AI costs a _lot_ of money relative to most product
| enhancements, so there's an inherent need to justify that
| expense.
|
| 3. All of the unwanted and pushy features are a way of
| creating metrics that justify the expense of AI for the
| C-suite.
|
| 4. It takes time for users to effectively say "We didn't
| want this," and in the meantime a whole host of engineers,
| engineering managers, and product managers have gotten
| promoted and/or better gigs because they could say "we
| added AI" to their product.
|
| There's also a herd effect among competing products that
| tends to make these things go in waves.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I think the real takeaway here is that Jensen Huang was
| smart enough to found a technology company that developed
| innovative products with real consumer demand. He's also
| smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall
| regarding consumer market demand saturation for high-
| margin products. No matter what happens with AI, Huang
| will be recorded as having executed the greatest pivot of
| all time in terms of company direction.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I think you're mostly saying the same thing he is, just
| from a different viewpoint. It's still manglement trying
| to make their decisions look right.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their
| editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send
| the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen.
|
| Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually
| useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your
| way until you need it.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using
| regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the
| regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| That's where I'm at with these.
|
| I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the
| pushiness of it that's annoying.
|
| That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to
| it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for
| example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into
| _everything_ office, and yet Excel still automatically
| converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it
| off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and
| only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window
| start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For
| multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the
| windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into
| it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or
| doesn't let me type into it.
|
| I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key
| and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a
| feature that worked perfectly on all versions before
| cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder
| what new core functionalities of their product they're
| going to fuck up and never fix.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade,
| really stuck with it through WSL's development... But the
| first time I saw internet ads on my start menu search
| result was kind of it for me, I switched my default boot
| to Linux and really haven't looked back. I don't really
| need Windows for my workflows, and though I'm using
| Windows for my current job, I'm at a point I'd rather not
| be.
|
| Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7
| IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar,
| that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate
| at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that
| Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't
| want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's quite the tale of poor decisions isn't it?
|
| Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting,
| continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS,
| etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating
| system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare.
| They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make
| some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem
| of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and
| convenient as mac + iOS.
|
| Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive
| telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying
| to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help
| ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world
| where they make their cash.
|
| Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as
| something you interact with directly all together and
| make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means.
|
| I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially
| if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the
| biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have
| made.
| egorfine wrote:
| AI in everything does make shareholders happy while fixing
| bugs in Excel does not.
| everdrive wrote:
| >I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the
| pushiness of it that's annoying.
|
| I agree with you in principle, but in practice these two
| are currently inextricable; if there's AI in the product,
| then it will be pushed / impossible to turn off / take
| resources away from actual product improvement.
| jerf wrote:
| I think a lot of the pushiness is a frantic effort to keep
| the bubble inflated and keep the market out of the trough
| of disillusionment. It won't work. The trough of
| disillusionment is inevitable. There is no jumping straight
| from peak of inflated expectations straight to the slope of
| enlightenment, because the market fundamentally needs the
| cleansing action of the trough of disillusionment to shake
| out the theoreticals and the maybes and get to what
| actually works.
|
| Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face
| they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and
| the things needing to prove themselves to get to real
| sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in
| a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff
| is while they don't tell the market how few people actually
| _chose_ to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a
| metric when it was pushed on them.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They
| have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the
| worst offender I've seen.
| tjpnz wrote:
| "X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that
| MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge
| though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just
| jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same
| path rapidly.
|
| _I_ want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I
| don 't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've
| gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is
| actually getting better.
|
| I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google
| searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're
| there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search
| results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't
| know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is
| insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain
| off from what I'm looking for.
| darepublic wrote:
| Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you
| cannot opt out of them.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Even when I do try them I find myself let down.
|
| I don't know what version of Gemini they're stuffing into
| Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science
| agent are all bad experiences.
|
| If you aren't putting something comparable to good paid
| models into your product then don't bother putting that
| feature out.
|
| Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk
| they're not coming back to waste their time with it. It's 10x
| as frustrating than regular product failures.
| fleeting900 wrote:
| Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-
| saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time "I'm
| sorry, I can't do that"
|
| As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other
| than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini's
| perennially sad, apologetic persona)
| jdeibele wrote:
| I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired"
| on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into
| everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social
| networking. It really hampered all their other offerings.
|
| https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour
| episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly
| tech but recently Trader Joe's
| kingkawn wrote:
| Do they talk about Trader Joe's illegal union busting and
| attempts to get the national labor relations board
| disbanded ?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| You could probably ask an LLM to listen and answer this
| question
| taeric wrote:
| The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is...
| really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know
| that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that
| time period was by them. Just so bad.
| dpark wrote:
| Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn't
| bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it.
|
| Google Plus was 100% hubris. "If we build our version of
| Facebook, it _course_ everyone will flock to it."
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't see Google Plus as hubris. I just think they saw
| a threat in Facebook and felt they had to try and build a
| competing product (and happened to have the time/money to
| invest).
|
| Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've
| been hubris.
| dpark wrote:
| My read on the whole Google Plus thing was that they
| drastically underestimated the difficulty of convincing
| people to actually use it. They clearly had the expertise
| to build it, and they had some interesting ideas with
| their circles of friends or whatever they called them
| (though I think they missed the mark on how they used
| them). But they couldn't convince anyone to actually use
| it.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong and internally they knew they had a major
| uphill battle, but I don't think so. So many of the
| choices they made were needlessly user hostile (e.g. real
| name requirements) that it seems like they assumed it
| would be a given that people would want to use it. When
| they later realized their error they tried to cram it
| down everyone's throats with stuff like YouTube comments
| only working from Google Plus accounts.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Maybe I'm wrong and internally they knew they had a
| major uphill battle, but I don't think so.
|
| I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence
| you think you're not wrong. :)
|
| At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as
| it proved to be.
|
| I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but
| all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of
| "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but
| also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same
| time, eg with circles).
|
| (Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the
| whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely
| saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall
| Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more
| like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.
|
| Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid
| take and an engaging comment.
| taeric wrote:
| It was more than just "if we build our version of
| Facebook." It was, "if we kill off every other social
| like thing we have and force people into circles, we can
| build our own Facebook." Google Buzz, in particular, was
| a fairly well done integration with Google Reader and
| Google Mail. I legit had discussions about articles with
| close friends because of it. But, alas, no. Had to die
| because their social was supposed to be Plus.
|
| I'm trying to remember all of the crap integrations with
| the likes of Youtube that were pushed. Just, screw that
| stuff. And quit trying to make yet another new messenger
| app!
| dcminter wrote:
| I think I could pretty easily have been persuaded by
| Google Plus. At that time I had broadly positive
| sentiments towards Google. Two things put me off.
|
| Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where
| YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+]
| logins. That rubbed me the wrong way.
|
| Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how
| you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different
| "circles" of friends. It sounded very complicated and I
| was worried that I'd publish something snarky to the
| wrong group of friends :)
|
| I wonder how many others had the same concern? Given that
| Steve Yegge accidentally published one of his rants to
| the public that was meant purely for internal Google
| consumption (I _think_ that was on G+ ...?) that might
| have been a legit thing to be wary of.
|
| There was also the very minor annoyance of G+ taking over
| the + operator in Google search (previously you could say
| +keyword instead of "keyword" to force literal search),
| but I don't think that would have swayed me against
| joining.
| dpark wrote:
| All that is true, but the primary problem with Google
| Plus was the network effect. Whenever I logged into
| Google plus, most of the content from friends was
| basically "cool, so this is Google plus" and nothing
| else, because everything at the time was on Facebook.
| Later Google started filling my feed with stuff from
| strangers because there was no organic content from
| people I actually cared about.
|
| If you can't solve the chicken and egg problem of
| engagement then nothing else really matters.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Google Wave... what an amazing piece of work just thrown
| in the trash.
|
| I never used any of its collaboration features, just
| looked at them. I _did_ use it as a friendly-for-non-
| geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in
| three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST.
| And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully
| slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was
| cheap and light and worked).
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Google Wave didn't just go away, it became Google Docs.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Nope! Docs was an acquisition. Google Wave became Apache
| Wave, where software goes to die.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean it actually got renamed, just that
| all the collaboration junk that people did in Wave still
| can be done almost exactly the same in Google Docs, with
| the added benefit that people actually know what it is
| and how to use it.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Google Plus launched between the time I interviewed at
| Google and the time I started work there, and that really
| took the shine off the whole thing.
| bambax wrote:
| Google Plus was insanely disastrous. And there was a guy,
| generally well respected, who was in charge of search I
| think? who went around advocating for Google Plus on
| forums, and people responding: if one needs Google Plus
| to find things, doesn't that mean that search is bad? But
| he didn't seem to make the connection, or he pretended
| not to.
| a-dub wrote:
| this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or
| otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal
| position and software uis keep turning into a constant game
| of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual
| menu or send button is.
|
| ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the
| engagement hacking is getting old.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger
| than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software
| marketing.
|
| Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1]
| is that they are always adding new features -- and if you
| want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them
| to know about new features so they feel like they are getting
| more out of their product.
|
| Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of
| the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill
| people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and
| getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams
| in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20
| seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear
| five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with
| right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do
| a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a
| lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit
| when I am under the gun.
|
| I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new
| features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can
| automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes
| closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.
|
| Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started
| _after_ I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with
| the product and now relieved that the task is over that 's a
| moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the
| product.
|
| [1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-
| grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| > Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite
| [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if
| you want people to keep renewing their subscription you
| want them to know about new features so they feel like they
| are getting more out of their product.
|
| This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do
| with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not
| convinced that any of the actual functional changes
| warranted a release or that they needed to be released at
| that point if a new release was needed. New software to
| justify new phones.
|
| You get lots of features but performance takes a second
| seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at
| paying a monthly subscription if only performance related
| improvements were made
| xp84 wrote:
| Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to
| have subscriptions is that there's a very real ongoing
| cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the
| software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x
| worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files
| work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).
|
| Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we
| don't. But the platform owners all want to move new
| hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we
| could just completely ignore, except that they'll abandon
| you to the wolves for security patches, which is about
| the only "new" thing we do need, if you're not on the
| latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually
| you need new hardware and drivers only get created for
| current and future OS releases.
|
| So the end result is we're being led on a wild goose
| chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and
| performance-killing crap we don't need, purely because we
| can't run the old hardware forever, and even when we can
| keep the old hardware going, we can't safely run old
| software for lack of patches.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Operating systems and the software that comes with them
| are a fat target for security problems. There's "new
| hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core
| components of desktops but also peripherals from things
| you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods
| that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both
| Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to
| handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them --
| look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases
| and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things
| to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a
| constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement
| USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but
| so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden
| nonsensical moves.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Everyone wants to complain about the "bloat" in Windows
| and macOS (and fair enough, there is a lot of bloat and
| cruft) but blame it all on capitalism, when Linux has
| kept apace in growth rate the whole time. My Linux
| installs have been 'round about 50% the size of my
| Windows installs these last 15 years, never really
| straying far. If we ask ourselves, "Why does _Linux_ need
| to keep growing? ", I think we can easily see that OS
| churn and growth is not just "shareholder value gotta go
| up."
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| iOS 6 was peak smartphone and I will die on that hill
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Honestly it's the first iOS I like less than the last. A
| lot I'd consider neutral.
|
| But now I've got several bugs (and I'm on last years
| flagship), liquid glass is ugly until you change a guy of
| settings, and I find myself accidentally triggering
| something (usually Siri) and being annoyed more.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Bell icon in corner. Colored dot on bell. No need to
| overthink the UX on this beyond what color to make the dot.
| plorg wrote:
| Can I dismiss that distracting little pip without having
| to click through a tutorial for every new feature? Can I
| just turn this off?
|
| This is especially irritating when, say, you set up a new
| phone and the app treats you as if you've never used it
| before.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's funny because lately I've been playing _Arknights_
| which is a gatcha game which is unusually good for free
| players. It has a few icons that light up with one of
| those dots when you have something to attend to (say you
| got a token to upgrade a character) but there is the dark
| pattern that that dot is always set on the cash store
| which means it is always set on the "stores" section
| which has substores for in-game currencies some of which
| you have to attend to periodically. So I see the dark
| pattern there.
|
| Really my complaint is anything that covers up content;
| if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px
| above or below the page to show me something I'd complain
| about lot less -- but if I had my way anything unwanted
| that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole
| c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust
| those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don't
| want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car
| or truck!)
| sodapopcan wrote:
| So don't use Google products. I'm not trying to be snarky
| but, other than at work I suppose, it's not that hard to
| avoid them.
| soperj wrote:
| Clippy agrees.
| neural_thing wrote:
| I was super mad about the help me write thing to, so I built
| https://owleditor.com - check it out!
| ryandrake wrote:
| The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out
| of control. I just want to use your software the way I've
| used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get
| it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI
| feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How
| nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every
| screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with
| popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so
| pathetic and desperate!
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If
| you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a
| % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe
| just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth
| story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
| wnevets wrote:
| > It's the constant nagging about them.
|
| If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it?
| Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.
| pwg wrote:
| > I can't use a google product without being harassed to the
| point of not being able to work by offers to "help me write"
| or whatever.
|
| Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog
| from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always
| popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I
| see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a
| ??? ???".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Clippy at least was funny, not creepy.
|
| And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow.
| Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
| jerf wrote:
| The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
|
| Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not
| anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web
| pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the
| university I was attending at the time. It was, let's
| say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to
| anyone, just had it internally.)
|
| That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft"
| "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well
| covered by a few million other web pages by now.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was
| exactly what I used!
|
| ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh.
| VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ -
| didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
| abustamam wrote:
| Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to
| dismiss.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Someone has a KPI to increase user engagement with AI
| features. The goal will be met, by any means.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _by offers to "help me write" or whatever._
|
| It's fucking Clippy all over again
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle.
| For that matter, neither have most website makers who
| constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an
| AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really
| need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a
| high Z-index.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
| vidarh wrote:
| Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion
| page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told
| it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have
| it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much
| meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will
| probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server
| provided what I needed for now)
|
| So, yes, I want AI in "everything".
|
| And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered
| automatically.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The person you're replying to noted that there will be "edge
| cases." Your response exemplifies this.
|
| In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There
| should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't think it exemplifies that _at all_. Using
| Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche _fallback_
| to the lack of an integrated AI solution.
|
| The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information
| from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue
| extremely common.
|
| I know a _lot_ of people - including non-technical people -
| who spend _a lot_ of time doing that in ways ranging from
| entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the
| more technically knowledgeable of those have started
| looking for AI tools to help them with that.
|
| To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things
| like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could
| help with this.
|
| E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they
| painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same
| Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without
| realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather:
| Trivially automatable _to a technical user like me_. But it
| could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively
| little integration effort in the browsers.
| TimByte wrote:
| There's a big difference between having access to AI tools and
| baking AI into everything by default
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in
| surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.
| glenstein wrote:
| I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in
| called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user
| scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language
| to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in
| hn the other day. [0]
|
| Also I believe _some_ agentic tasking can make sense: scroll
| through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed
| contemporary hard sci-fi.
|
| But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems
| lacking in imagination.
|
| 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
| cwillu wrote:
| I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want
| the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and
| fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
| danudey wrote:
| Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you,
| the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey)
| that changes the page for you. This means you only make one
| request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the
| page from that point on.
| glenstein wrote:
| Fair enough, you are right. To me this is a good example of
| a tailored LLM application that actually does something you
| want.
| cobbal wrote:
| Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels
| stupidly vulnerable to injection.
| glenstein wrote:
| Definitely worth asking the devs about, they're active on
| HN.
| benterix wrote:
| If you want a short answer: most people don't.
|
| But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost
| meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with
| startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons.
| However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want
| it, in very specific products, and with certain defined
| functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody
| and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything
| sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Does anyone want AI in anything?
|
| Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI
| can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are
| talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are
| against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting
| annoyed with it the whole time.
|
| Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any
| kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many,
| whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being
| either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can
| grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually
| can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
| xinayder wrote:
| > Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want
| this.
|
| No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just
| driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI.
| Why not provide an extension?
| Certhas wrote:
| And you know this how?
|
| Have you seen usage statistics of AI integrations?
|
| I personally don't like them, but I don't expect that I am
| a representative user. Nor are the people I know.
| mkayokay wrote:
| Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that
| positive either:
|
| Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what's next together -
| <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-
| the-f...>
| nijave wrote:
| >Does anyone want AI in anything?
|
| Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble
| means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a
| clear and vetted use case.
|
| It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged
| search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to
| the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z
| might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to
| library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I
| can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty
| good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much
| better than traditional search engines can do.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was
| working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about
| whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live
| preview of another document as an object that can be inserted
| in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and
| asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things
| that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that
| it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just
| use bookmarks.
|
| That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me
| exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not
| what I got.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it
| was talking about
|
| Spoiler: you didn't.
| Theodores wrote:
| AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't
| have to use the features but they are there for you.
|
| However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a
| Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself
| the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI.
| Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit
| like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can
| always spit out the meat.
|
| Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped
| CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they
| could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the
| minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI
| is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.
|
| Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas
| that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is
| not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that
| could be dominated by them.
|
| There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own
| case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die
| penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want
| to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises
| in extreme ultraviolence.
|
| Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost
| their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered
| job boards.
|
| Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis,
| then there are those that have no water and massive utility
| bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!
|
| Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system
| with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for
| resenting AI!
| killerstorm wrote:
| If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often
| you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible
| documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-
| the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.
| vharuck wrote:
| I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI _in_ everything,
| I 'd like to see more web services and local software offer
| APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully,
| "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as
| "embedded browsers."
| andrewmutz wrote:
| The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers
| is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that
| maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political
| unrest are another
|
| I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled
| with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the
| web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language
| to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me
| search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or
| "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
| xinayder wrote:
| We both know this is never going to happen on mainstream
| browsers, they'll just keep shoving AI into your face until
| you become dependent to it.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might
| mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching
| for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us
| complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem
| to want to prevent users from having it.
|
| It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the
| only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to
| see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or
| by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, &
| modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop
| where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-
| originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
| tjpnz wrote:
| That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam
| Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose
| you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's magic when it's optional.
|
| I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.
|
| But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what
| rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.
|
| From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by
| saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed
| round appears.
|
| As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
| mtillman wrote:
| Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the
| show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be
| staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their
| non-profit foundation. That's the moment I stopped donating. I
| daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have
| managed to keep trash out of their free version.
| RyanOD wrote:
| For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions.
| That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm
| online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near
| as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do
| on my behalf and gathering information from them privately
| towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for
| it.
|
| If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able
| to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but
| typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so
| the app isn't really needed.
| Kye wrote:
| The new similar sound search in Ableton Live is handy. It's
| getting stem separation soon and I expect to get some use out
| of it.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I
| see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past,
| recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value.
|
| Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere
| else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system,
| browser.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| AI is useful. I use Claude code every single day for building
| software.
|
| I also wouldn't want to go back to only web search for finding
| things out. Search engines are generally inferior.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent,
| meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition,
| getting better IDE tooling, and such.
|
| Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.
| a_t48 wrote:
| Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I'm rusty
| and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a
| query that mutates the db.
| danudey wrote:
| "How do I get a list of every resource in a project"
|
| "How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count"
|
| Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI".
|
| For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it
| very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be
| nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced
| spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local
| models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a
| LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I
| think it is a common enough thing for people to do.
|
| The problem with many AI features in software is that they
| serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the
| form of some button or text field that is always visible and
| does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.
| beefnugs wrote:
| What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to
| push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox
| just support whatever extension features would allow other
| people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can
| install it?
|
| Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue
| opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of
| bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual
| revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even
| knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
| quitit wrote:
| I really don't mind having AI-driven features -- if it's an
| improvement.
|
| Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some
| types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just
| the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every
| digital era before us:
|
| 1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!
|
| 1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can
| fit.
|
| 1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?
|
| 2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No
| object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.
|
| 2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully
| enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a
| touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.
|
| 2020s: AI, AI, AI!
| etempleton wrote:
| Step 1. Integrate AI
|
| Step 2. ???
|
| Step 3. Profit
| georgeecollins wrote:
| For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't
| take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause
| you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about
| details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second
| page.
|
| The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to
| be right. That's still better than a google search in many
| cases.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The AI tools _can_ be an amazing upgrade over normal search
| boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of
| value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to
| track down which files contain the code I'm looking for and to
| summarize how the pieces fit together.
|
| There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren't in-your-
| face LLM prompts that flatter you with "Excellent question!".
| It's great having my photo library automatically annotated so I
| can search for things like "moose" and it will bring up that
| picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember
| what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find
| it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily
| available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac - but Apple has of
| course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for
| some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM,
| though, just calls to good old human-curated databases.
| Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the
| workflow could be smoother.
| rsaz wrote:
| Have you considered Raycast? I don't use it for those
| features myself, but it is extensible and has a large
| community, so even if it can't do those things by default,
| I'm sure you could configure it to.
| junon wrote:
| I can't even open Adobe Acrobat anymore. There's AI shit in
| almost every corner and toolbar of the app.
|
| This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech
| altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of
| this I can take.
| ls-a wrote:
| They need to access your data somehow
| paradox460 wrote:
| The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of
| life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do
| things like detect music beats, automatically level audio,
| transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed
| voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle
| motion tracking, and more
|
| Most (all?) of it runs locally too
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in
| replying.
|
| I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are
| interesting to me.
|
| I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products
| by complex conditions.
|
| I want AI in my car to make me safer.
|
| I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of
| interruptions.
|
| I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have
| already asked me.
|
| I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate.
|
| I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.
| phplovesong wrote:
| Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried
| it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI
| has not really improved anything.
|
| AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always
| anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of
| useless.
| nickff wrote:
| Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying
| almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the
| satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.
| tim333 wrote:
| I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple
| of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI.
| Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add
| ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and
| Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image
| format.
|
| I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them
| and actually useful.
| muppetman wrote:
| No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to
| see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble
| is getting close to popping.
| darepublic wrote:
| I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once
| you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness
| and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly
| irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome
| devtool console, and in postman sigh
| notatoad wrote:
| Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a
| lot of people are happy with that.
|
| in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app
| that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i
| think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other
| important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation
| phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that
| looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much
| incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing
| ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it
| more subtly.
| subscribed wrote:
| I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in
| vscode.
|
| It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing
| config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing
| scripts).
|
| It definitely has its place.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Does anyone want AI in anything?_
|
| I most definitely do.
|
| I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all
| the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring
| out the right regex for it.
|
| I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50
| different versions of the current URL, using a different US
| state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into
| a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".
|
| Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want
| everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that
| can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate
| stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so
| much time.
|
| Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI
| programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But
| hopefully soon!
| vitaflo wrote:
| Literally this. I don't know why this hasn't been worked on.
| It's the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe
| that's why cuz it'd be actually useful.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch
| points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other
| newly introduced features.
| mannanj wrote:
| The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free
| by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've
| seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market
| though.
| wslh wrote:
| Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and
| just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking"
| (e.g. prompting)
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| Yes. I want AI in some things (some)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools
| geooff_ wrote:
| I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a
| git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This
| should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device
| model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You
| either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a
| complete rework of everything "designed for agents".
| raffael_de wrote:
| It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate
| any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my
| machines to be predictable and stupid.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It's great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been
| easier.
|
| There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is
| everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don't want to
| feel behind the times and for every great use case there are
| several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI
| worse.
| bambax wrote:
| Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other
| tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the
| more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and
| become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly
| deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a
| word?)
| standardly wrote:
| Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at
| the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode,
| glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox
| and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go
| to chatgpt.com
| ericmcer wrote:
| We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all
| shitty implementations replacing what we are used to.
|
| I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the
| future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way
| better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through
| pages of search results is just nicer.
|
| It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and
| the generalized way humans communicate.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| How dare you deny your AI overlord an oportunity to train
| itself further on your data for free?!
| Krasnol wrote:
| I would love it if it could clean up my mp3 collection.
|
| I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a
| hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades
| until it comes.
| kulahan wrote:
| Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on
| some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then
| sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics
| much faster for me. I personally _do_ want it in a browser,
| because that 's... pretty much the _only_ way I use LLMs.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Good question.
|
| I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I
| just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something
| then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent.
| For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use
| AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I
| wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to
| Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-
| shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken
| me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
|
| AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
|
| The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural
| resources used for AI, BTW.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does anyone want AI in anything?_
|
| AI ad blocking might be nice.
| 8note wrote:
| i probably do, but i want it to work as some magic behind the
| scenes, not as an embedded chat app that i have to type in.
|
| a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Does anyone want AI in anything?
|
| Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser
| Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based
| adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to
| notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index
| thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all.
| I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and
| click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want
| it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the
| buttons that equate to "Reject All".
|
| I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my
| contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see
| fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
|
| Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to
| do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so
| that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have
| an AI agent at all.
|
| Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of
| different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is
| going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it
| would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing
| stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
|
| We are a very fucked-up industry.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Mozilla's gonna Mozilla.
|
| I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are
| overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is
| an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up
| about it. I can just ignore it.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to
| `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling
| that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-
| click dropdown menu.
| noir_lord wrote:
| browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
| browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
| browser.ml.chat.page set to false
| browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
| browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
| browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
| browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
| browser.ml.enable set to false
| browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
| browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
| browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
| browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
| extensions.ml.enabled set to false
|
| That should do it.
|
| Can also use the user config override if you want to do it
| without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere
| new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
| user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
| user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
| user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
| user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
|
| It's a garbage feature that no one appears to have asked for.
| whalesalad wrote:
| So sick of all these hacks. I've been a Firefox user for
| decades but it's time to throw in the towel.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Certainly starting to feel that way isn't it.
|
| It's frustrating that the choice is between "becoming
| bad" (firefox) and "much worse" (chrome).
| maleldil wrote:
| > it's time to throw in the towel
|
| And do what? Use a Chromium-based browser, which is
| infinitely worse?
| nativeit wrote:
| Forks exist
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| This is just as user friendly as the rest of the firefox
| configuration. I can't recommend it to anyone in good faith
| anymore.
| rpgbr wrote:
| At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused,
| AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to
| stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings,
| like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting
| protection that many sites don't play nice with.
| vt240 wrote:
| I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and
| `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that
| right-click behavior.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but
| that's really not my point.
|
| Mozilla _has_ now shoved AI down my throat as a user of
| Firefox. It 's one thing if they want to pursue
| questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis
| -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue
| with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the
| open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they
| didn't force it on the user.
|
| It's another thing when they impose it on the user base,
| and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to
| having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the
| average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist;
| on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost
| luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many
| of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
| BearOso wrote:
| From their history, you can expect the exact opposite. Remember
| the Mr robot fiasco?
| TimByte wrote:
| Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more
| front-and-center over time
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I want AI in VSC as an assistant, but that's it.
|
| If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to
| things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time
| ago.
|
| Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might
| pay for YT if they did that.
| nyeah wrote:
| Yeah, I think there's a market for suppressing AI slop.
| jordanb wrote:
| The fact that Mozilla _thinks_ people want AI in Firefox is proof
| that Mozilla has the wrong leadership.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Welllll.. Yes and no.
|
| If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind
| it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is
| very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad
| (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it
| is much better at context)
|
| But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech
| datamining my behaviour.
|
| It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on
| services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will
| feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be
| using chrome.
| jmathai wrote:
| There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web
| browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's
| a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the
| masses.
|
| What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity
| and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but
| that's what makes products great.
|
| I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into
| Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I
| disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they
| just don't want what they're getting.
|
| Tweeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
| transcriptase wrote:
| Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to
| be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer
| restrictions on extensions.
|
| That's it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a
| sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with
| whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
| brazukadev wrote:
| Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.
| aquova wrote:
| I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure,
| some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but
| given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for
| cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times
| by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to
| branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to
| try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has
| essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at
| least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the
| market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people
| to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish
| themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc
| features being thrown out there.
|
| The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is
| adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's
| viewed as an essential feature.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any
| engineering reason, at least not these days, but from
| continued momentum of being the market leader._
|
| Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely
| due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at
| the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the
| market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost
| just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is
| currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't
| believe they can do it again.
|
| I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not
| fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we
| desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights
| Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the
| negotiating table.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| #/m...
| rollcat wrote:
| > Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the
| leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
|
| I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue
| source is Google. The moment they start regaining any
| foothold?
|
| Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and
| funding Mozilla publicly.
| tempest_ wrote:
| They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.
| Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and
| it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
|
| Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
|
| Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most
| phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different
| preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was
| advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20
| years.
|
| Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they
| use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any
| other option than chrome.
| glenstein wrote:
| Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of
| the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to
| me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on
| phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's
| explanations of market share change when talking about
| Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market
| share change by an order of magnitude.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > They were losing because MS bundled IE with every
| device.
|
| They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they
| have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced
| to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned
| (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any
| serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
|
| Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some
| people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.)
| Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to
| make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial
| cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's
| strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special
| relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users
| that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They
| claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't
| understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox
| shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took
| to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have
| been extensions, and doing bizarre _marketing
| experiments._
|
| > Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops,
| they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is
| any other option than chrome.
|
| Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5%
| of the market. There _isn 't really another option,_ no
| matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets _more_ than all of
| its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow
| money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on
| resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to
| run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps
| dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
|
| But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully
| dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons
| are that it chooses its direction based on Google's
| desires.
|
| edit: the craziest part of this common argument about
| Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like
| the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its
| browser to everything it could figure out how to, and
| Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market
| to Firefox. The idea that _Google_ is some special
| impossible challenge when _Microsoft_ owned every
| computer is insane. It 's impossible to beat Google when
| they pay your salary.
| hbn wrote:
| It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a
| good product in a space where the competition wasn't
| blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how
| much better a browser can be and spread the word.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It wasn't challenging the market leader that made them
| successful. It's because Firefox was precisely a better
| browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around
| open web standards was great. There were lots of
| "challenging" going back then.
|
| But simply challenging isn't enough. People like to tell
| this tale where just being an underdog gets you some
| benefit. But it doesn't. Firefox was way leaner, opened
| faster, had extensions, so on.
| BearOso wrote:
| The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than
| it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a
| web browser and email program.
|
| People in the organization are trying to use what's left of
| the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own
| initiatives.
| glenstein wrote:
| What would you say is the most costly initiative that's
| siphoning money away from core browser development right
| now?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more
| than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to
| develop a web browser and email program.
|
| You under estimated the work to develop a web browser.
| Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium
| fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock
| Origin working.
|
| [1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
| pfortuny wrote:
| > Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any
| engineering reason, at least not these days, but from
| continued momentum of being the market leader.
|
| s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
|
| Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a
| very long tail.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I see the point, but them following the leader on this does
| not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be
| as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going
| to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have
| learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess
| not...
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't
| pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other
| revenue source
|
| They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox
| development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's
| money in a fund.
| glenstein wrote:
| They do exactly that! Their endowment is now $1.2 billion
| and its year to year growth is one of their strongest non-
| Google revenue streams.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| There is no possible way to compete against a competent
| trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good
| browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search
| to advertise their browser.
|
| It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply
| not enough differentiation potential in the core browser
| product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
|
| I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy
| donations and became largely independent.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > Chrome has essentially won. ... Sitting around quietly
| isn't going to get people to switch
|
| You hit the nail on the head with this one
| genter wrote:
| I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism
| which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for.
| Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely
| accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two
| different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
| debugnik wrote:
| > kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money
|
| Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-
| profit.
| perch56 wrote:
| Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla
| Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
| debugnik wrote:
| And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the
| other way around. We get a discussion about this every few
| months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it
| up.
| glenstein wrote:
| Right, and my understanding is that structuring lets them
| do the search licensing deals that have been the lifeline
| of the whole org.
| paradox460 wrote:
| A distinction without substance
| debugnik wrote:
| And yours redundant, I made that clear already.
|
| > nitpick
|
| > to find faults in details that are not important
| phantasmish wrote:
| I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a
| distributed social network, back when they had enough market
| share to attempt such a thing.
|
| An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
|
| Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything
| useful.
| rollcat wrote:
| Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects:
| Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would
| at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
|
| Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious
| problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle
| it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15
| years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years
| ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then
| killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there
| was little space for a new contender.
|
| Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real
| fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because
| they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation
| is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the
| perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub
| platform.
| lukan wrote:
| "but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important"
|
| Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them
| to know?
| mbonnet wrote:
| The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and
| key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide
| adoption.
| rollcat wrote:
| Yep. Everyone understands email, not everyone understands
| that email is federated, and yet everyone benefits from
| federation.
| glenstein wrote:
| Rust/Servo/Quantum culminated in tangible benefits that
| reflect successfully played out projects from which Firefox
| reaped major rewards. And FireFox OS, perhaps more than any
| other, is something I wish we had right now, because if
| they never gave up on it and we had a 10+ year old
| alternative mobile OS waiting for its moment, it could have
| been well positioned in a moment like this one where
| Android is increasingly betraying the trust of its
| developers. I think the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership, quickly
| forgotten, could have been meaningful if there was good
| vision.
|
| Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had
| relevance, and core services like email, search and maps
| that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting
| would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS.
| Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad
| brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if
| that unfortunately amounted to nothing.
| benrutter wrote:
| Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at
| mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly
| just _take out tracking and AI features_ from the browser.
| swed420 wrote:
| Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new
| browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird
| charcircuit wrote:
| >that mostly just take out tracking and AI features
|
| Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by
| the market and aren't a vocal minority.
| railka wrote:
| I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use
| most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
|
| Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do
| something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users
| who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being
| deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing
| the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed
| the integration of local models or aggregators, such as
| Openrouter, Huggingface...)
|
| Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only
| Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the
| Chromium engine for their browsers.
|
| Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more
| average users will use Firefox.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| It's losing market share because it doesn't keep up with
| supporting the latest web standards.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And because they are wasting their time on these side
| quests that could have been spent improving the actual
| browser.
| dymk wrote:
| They're losing market share because they're not bundled
| with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you
| visit a Google property
| wpm wrote:
| Which standards and are they actually standards or just
| some "draft" slop from Google?
| charcircuit wrote:
| For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't
| do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone
| can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to
| use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is
| "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
| thsbrown wrote:
| I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's
| focused on people and companies creating new things, people
| here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
|
| The pessimism can get old.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that
| every time I see news about it is because its developers are
| trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments
| I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money
| instead of working on more important things.
|
| My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing
| market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or
| Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me
| switch.
|
| Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and
| installed it on the computers of friends and family. They
| seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the
| outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that
| back.
| shawnz wrote:
| Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best
| browser for me:
|
| - An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which
| supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on
| Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
|
| - Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab
| management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups,
| container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-
| to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
|
| - A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and
| doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you
| configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course
| works on mobile too
|
| - And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab
| grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with
| local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some
| cloud enabled features as well
| stogot wrote:
| When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test
| that this week and their docs say to use a third-party
| extension.
| shawnz wrote:
| They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature
| flag in nightly currently:
| https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-
| to-wi...
| benatkin wrote:
| Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner
| prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
|
| I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and
| I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the
| rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they
| threaten to use Swift.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where
| that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna
| recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped
| recommending it because I can't support it (literally,
| meaning guide the people I recommend it to through
| annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through
| Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old
| functionality back and give me some measure of privacy,
| and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to
| look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in
| 2010.)
|
| I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and
| without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome;
| they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that
| Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they
| gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail
| on absolutely everything again.
|
| But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they
| would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by
| employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other
| extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they
| danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome
| until they decided not to (or until Google decided for
| them, because Firefox doing that would have _annihilated_
| Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no
| reason to be confident that Firefox won 't be
| "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest
| V4."
| k1musab1 wrote:
| Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with
| sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust
| hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half
| my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric
| enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be
| even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?
| metabagel wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over
| Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by
| a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome
| if you care about your privacy?
|
| Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who
| want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing
| with).
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > if you care about your privacy?
|
| I think you just answered your own questions.
| godelski wrote:
| Then explain Brave then. They market as privacy but it
| has similar issues being chromium. The most critical
| being that by being chromium Google still gets to dictate
| how the internet works
| s3p wrote:
| I'm not sure they did. What do you think is the answer to
| "Why would you trust chrome if you care about privacy?"
| tim333 wrote:
| I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both.
| Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and
| consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.
|
| Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat
| worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I
| mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address
| and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use
| mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the
| problem?
| mac-attack wrote:
| > re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some
| Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
|
| The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type
| and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more
| data they have on you, the more money they make which is
| why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up
| as much data as possible even if it breaks the law.
| Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion
| dollars for "unlawfully tracking users' geolocation,
| incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without
| proper consent"[1]
|
| They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the
| browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet
| browsing and information about you.
|
| 1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-
| uninstall-goog...
| tim333 wrote:
| Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really,
| including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using
| them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad
| happening. They used to have my full location data but
| offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so
| they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where
| people are. I think people sometimes people worry about
| the wrong stuff.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer
| over Firefox, because it was already installed on their
| device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop
| computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Every time I try Firefox it's slower than Chrome or Safari.
| Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I
| suspect that's why its market share keeps dropping because
| all the fluff doesn't matter if the core feature is just
| worse.
| mattthebaker wrote:
| Personally, I don't really see the value proposition in
| being able to load and serve you ads faster, compared to
| a browser with a proper ad blocker.
| mbonnet wrote:
| The average user does not care about ads being present.
| Speed is _paramount_.
| thfuran wrote:
| Shouldn't getting rid of all the ads make things notably
| faster?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It does. Fundamentally.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I disagree. I have installed adblockers on different
| relatives machines. Without fail, they mentioned how much
| better surfing now is.
|
| They did not not mind the ads, they just didn't know
| there is an easy way to get rid of them
| munificent wrote:
| You are radically underestimating how much slow web
| performance is _caused by_ the massive volume of ads and
| user tracking data attached to each site.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| The performance is fine and has always been fine for me,
| across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward.
| No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine,
| either.
|
| Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the
| sports car next to you when you're driving and being
| jealous, IMO
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see
| it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome,
| and Edge side by side all the time, and I never
| experience any difference in page load times except on
| YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully
| delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.
| godelski wrote:
| There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox
| and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You
| also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.
|
| Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average
| person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch
| them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech
| forum but most people don't.
|
| But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize
| that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how
| the internet operates. People love to complain about
| Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first
| protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to
| become standards. That's the entire problem right there
| ajkjk wrote:
| they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and
| falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that
| "everything is being corrupted and turning against users
| over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser
| that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples
| of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone
| hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend
| that it represents than the feature itself. We are
| soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and
| being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the
| right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely
| zero, and it's not right now... and since they're
| ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of
| "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is
| especially jarring. When Google does something evil every
| day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla
| does something evil you're truly disappointed because
| they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the
| good guys.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yes. It's the hypocrisy that is annoying.
|
| Google is expected to be evil so nobody is disappointed.
| godelski wrote:
| Are you sure this isn't perception bias?
|
| Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone
| carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"
|
| Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives
| more attention and discussion.
|
| We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely
| obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any
| different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where
| Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo.
| People then complain about how helpless they are to fight
| off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to
| not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is
| Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does
| not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and
| fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that
| these complaints are more driven by our want to complain
| or our need to justify our current choice than it is
| about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we
| are talking about an optional feature and we're
| pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while
| ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's
| not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're
| on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often
| people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread
| everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I
| for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press
| <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or
| navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my
| websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100%
| optional.
| ajkjk wrote:
| yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased)
| examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if
| evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value
| which we are discovering the value of. The claim is
| "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not
| morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy
| does _any_ of the things we 've seen. In every case
| they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to
| do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.
|
| > You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?
|
| No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and
| shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation
| is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool
| and despise the way corporations are trying to force them
| on you.
|
| The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as
| an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the
| concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features"
| as much as it is the fact that despite this quote
|
| "It's safe to say that the people who volunteered to
| "shape" the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52
| responses at the time of writing, _all_ rejected the idea
| and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into
| Firefox. "
|
| They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that
| didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they
| consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation
| in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because
| their attitude is consistently that the point of
| soliciting feedback is to _give the appearance of
| soliciting feedback_ rather than a genuine concern for
| doing right by users.
|
| Presumably you saw
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the
| Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly
| disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction
| to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong"
| then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be
| interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this
| further? We want to make sure we trully understand what
| you're struggling with." response was. The grievance
| _already happened_ , there was nothing else to discuss.
| Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy
| collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and
| doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response
| to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine
| guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot
| instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody
| respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the
| critique they get until they have leadership that can
| demonstrate humanity.
|
| (Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just
| particularly frustrating because there's no reason they
| couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could
| just do better things _for free_. We 're in a societal
| epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but
| pretending to; if an actual person acted the way
| corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit +
| distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-
| seeking things--you would find them sickening and
| repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations
| to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what
| benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better
| world?)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I notice people love to hate Firefox_
|
| They may be misplacing their hatred for Mozilla, which
| legitimately deserves the ire.
| dimal wrote:
| > every time I see news about it is because its developers
| are trying to push something that users dislike
|
| Don't blame developers for management decisions.
| CjHuber wrote:
| I don't know. I'm always a bit appalled that getting privacy
| in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the
| user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of
| dishonest of them that they don't surface those settings when
| they're enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but
| still I feel like there shouldn't even have to be reason for
| an extra fork like that.
| godelski wrote:
| You mean the standards that Google adds to chrome and then
| turns into standards?
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web
| standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the
| users are oddballs with strange configurations that break
| everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
| mccr8 wrote:
| One longstanding issue with gradients was fixed recently.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771
| Kwantuum wrote:
| I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because
| it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues
| in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium
| browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable
| past a certain point.
| mrandish wrote:
| Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They
| are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related
| bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to
| fundamentals like resource allocation.
|
| You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
| kakuri wrote:
| I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I
| can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be
| better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great
| dev tools.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high
| end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools
| are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites
| where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply
| setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the
| inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
| easygenes wrote:
| I think Lizard is the best UI for elements hiding in FF:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/lizardextensi...
|
| The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for
| ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark,
| then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex
|
| More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-
| 8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f...
|
| I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools
| have remained obscure, but with a cult following because
| they're such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to
| your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern
| browser dom selector tools.
|
| For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin's element picker is
| the gold standard for manipulating pages.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts
| to do something about it are met with negativity.
|
| Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser
| engine faster and more stable? _IIRC, they canceled that
| project._ Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN
| and now this AI assistant.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently,
| more average users will use Firefox.
|
| I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it
| provides more convenience.
|
| I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that
| money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with
| negligible changes.
|
| The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people
| care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown
| personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels
| to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue
| that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact
| with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be
| measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
|
| I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me
| switch between professional accounts and private accounts.
| That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most
| people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability
| to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought
| just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have
| this feature?
|
| Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need
| to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like
| privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser.
| I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi
| was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these
| features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does
| Firefox actually have?
|
| Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you
| want people to use your web browser maybe you should try
| offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes,
| you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome
| anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser.
| That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-
| party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web
| browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that
| time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
|
| If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I
| don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
| bloppe wrote:
| > Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently,
| more average users will use Firefox.
|
| Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the
| 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I want Mozilla Observatory.
|
| They did a good job with that.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory
| Xss3 wrote:
| I dont care if Firefox is faster than chrome or edge.
|
| I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.
| xnx wrote:
| > Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird
| to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with
| fewer restrictions on extensions.
|
| Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with
| better extension support and a mobile version.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better
| extension support and a mobile version.
|
| The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only
| serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to
| get a monopoly in this area (although practically they
| already have).
|
| Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more.
| It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its
| decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even
| subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a
| usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance
| that I will ditch Firefox.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _Nobody wants anything from Mozilla_
|
| Sufficiently accurate. That's the reason they're trying all
| these things. It's because the original objective was met and
| now they're trying to find something else to put all their
| money to.
| mrandish wrote:
| I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox
| squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too
| often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on
| AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser
| vendors are pushing :
| https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-
| ai-....
|
| I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to
| run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their
| multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-
| term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-
| chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox
| should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
|
| > "the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it's process and
| trust isolation."
|
| Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to
| technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host
| browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone
| else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox
| as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus
| AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be
| attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have
| high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI
| leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
| bakugo wrote:
| > with fewer restrictions on extensions
|
| I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and
| was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has _more_
| restrictions in terms of where you 're allowed to install
| extensions from.
|
| You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by
| Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of
| Firefox.
| oytis wrote:
| Wrong, Google wants it very much. Otherwise there would be a
| usable, well-maintained web browser without AI on the market and
| everyone would just use it
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I
| want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I
| want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like
| response. I tire of all these interfaces.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely
| different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead,
| you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant
| somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly
| LLM agents).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| eventually, but that's going to take a decade at this rate...
| no one has a voice assistant that can actually do anything
| worthwhile beyond than flip some light switches
|
| right now we could get a browser that understands what's on
| the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely
| possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate
| some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user
| experience
|
| I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single
| thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd
| rather AI handle it
| meindnoch wrote:
| yuck.
| pissmeself wrote:
| > I want to ask for things using human language and get a
| human-like response.
|
| Try leaving the basement.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I do all the time, I went to a restaurant the other day and
| had to _ask_ for a physical menu instead of using an app.
|
| I can't get pizza delivered without using an app.
|
| When I go to a pharmacy, a _person_ tells me to get my meds
| by putting my information into an app they used to replace
| the person at the register.
|
| When I go get coffee, my order is in the mix with a dozen
| people who ordered via an app... I can't get priority despite
| being literally right there waiting.
|
| We've apparently given up on hiring people for various tasks,
| so at least give me an app that understands what I ask it
| instead of funneling me through some "user experience" that
| differs for every single thing I do.
| hooverd wrote:
| try asking a person?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| society has clearly moved on beyond "pay a person to do it"
| so if I can talk to something that can understand language
| well enough to do tasks on my behalf that's what I have to
| take
| basilgohar wrote:
| What is most upsetting is that they just offered access to the
| large commercial AI providers and no clear way to have a self-
| hosted or alternative option. THIS is where they lost their way.
| They must be profiting or partnering, no longer serving the
| community.
| wordpad wrote:
| Heck yes, we want jt, can't imagine browsing without it.
|
| It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we
| consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of
| value.
| smodo wrote:
| Well maybe you lose your ability to focus or your sanity or
| your privacy but yeah.
| topaz0 wrote:
| So you can get 10x the brain damage in the same amount of time.
| This is not a great case.
| hooverd wrote:
| "I want to liquefy my brain on short form video" is quite a
| take.
| riskable wrote:
| If I could get Firefox to perform searches on my behalf via the
| AI sidebar _that would be amazing!_ Are you kidding me? YES I
| WANT THIS!
|
| Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely
| not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension--
| where I can pick which AI I'm using--then I'm all for it. I'll
| just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.
|
| NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red
| because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper
| grammar-checking AI too. _That_ would be super useful. I 'd love
| that!
|
| Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are
| completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I think it could be nice in the longer term, as AI gets better.
| Especially if it's local.
|
| No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The
| interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact
| with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to
| some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual
| websites, then we would actually be able to use the public
| internet.
|
| It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though,
| but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a
| browser engine.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas,
| and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very
| surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome
| and their search engine.
|
| I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for
| what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff
| turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm
| saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things,
| uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I
| did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't
| too impressed with what it does.
|
| I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit
| struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm,
| adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site
| security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.
|
| Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little
| to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to
| state that user's don't want this.
|
| Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really
| don't like any form of change. But there are other users that
| might want some of these things if they are well executed.
|
| Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak
| effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half
| assed products and services they've developed, launched
| (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they
| have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And
| the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign
| that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".
| joelthelion wrote:
| I wouldn't mind being able to quickly ask an llm about the page
| I'm browsing or some text I select.
| flatline wrote:
| Serious question: to what end? I'm pretty adept at skimming
| text and honing in on things of interest. I have also spent
| years in academic and professional environments developing
| those skills, so I genuinely may not understand some common use
| cases.
| flkiwi wrote:
| In a typical corporate environment, you cannot assume the
| recipient of an email will read past the first sentence,
| maybe not even the subject line. A vast number of people
| simply do not read. They _can_ but they don't.
| godshatter wrote:
| I can see this if you're looking over something and don't
| know what it is. Highlight it and right-click or whatever and
| ask the AI to give you a quick summary. Similar to how
| wikipedia links will show enough in the preview to get an
| idea what it might be.
| kace91 wrote:
| I'm currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I'm using Firefox as
| a daily driver for the first time in a decade.
|
| While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the
| amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up:
| Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions
| and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed
| through a popup tutorial...
|
| It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly
| similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was
| removable in settings, but still.
| rwmj wrote:
| They could have saved all the Google money and built a huge
| non-profit foundation dedicated to making the best browser.
| Instead they spent it on C-suite salaries and idiotic side
| quests. This is the consequence.
| noir_lord wrote:
| They have Telemetry as well which is on by default - see under
| "Firefox Data Collection and Use" in the settings.
| dralley wrote:
| I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but
| I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.
|
| HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google
| Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the
| browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get
| criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times
| (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not
| enough, sometimes at the same time?).
|
| The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to
| remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been
| dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have
| the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for
| translation (and being able to do content translation without
| sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible
| feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least
| try to match their competitors. Especially if they could
| potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only
| way at this point to make up any significant ground in
| marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Well, as long as:
|
| - It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning
| home,
|
| - it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an
| update,
|
| - its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of
| training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the
| training data not being accessible as long as it's properly
| marked in the manifest),
|
| - and the weights and training code are open,
|
| I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as
| assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have
| any problems with it being there.
| railka wrote:
| These tabs will probably be similar to the tabs in browsers from
| OpenAI and Perplexity. And some people really do use these
| browsers. Perhaps this is Mozilla's chance to monetize. Give at
| least some users the opportunity to use this feature and pay
| Mozilla.
| chironjit wrote:
| I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that
| this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I
| appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I
| have questions.
|
| My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side
| pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
|
| I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle
| ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none
| (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)
| berkes wrote:
| > Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a
| squished webpage.
|
| I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it
| utterly useless.
|
| Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no
| value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case
| Mistral).
|
| The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu)
| hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for
| gpt, copilot, mistral or even claude and the sidebar just gives
| an error) but even if they did: what problem do these extra
| buttons and integrations solve? Am I missing something?
|
| Do note that I would love integration the other way around: to
| have an AI agent (through an MCP for example) drive my firefox.
| Safely, contained, etc etc. I am not an AI luddite. I just find
| the firefox sidebar offering no value at all.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I think that's exactly what people are doing w the Playwright
| MCP...
| prophesi wrote:
| I was also frustrated by the short context length for
| summarizing and found you can increase it in about:config
| via:
|
| browser.ml.chat.maxLength
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Being able to e.g. hook up Claude Code to any webpage would
| be killer for both web development and task automation.
| like_any_other wrote:
| I thought the AI pane was convenient. Then I wanted to try a
| different AI service, and couldn't do so without losing all the
| content in the currently open pane. And I realized - this would
| be so much better if it was just a regular tab. Like we already
| have.
| llarsson wrote:
| There are already APIs being developed that assume a browser has
| an LLM either inside it or otherwise available, see for instance
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Summarizer_...
|
| So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they
| are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT
| or whatever under the hood to implement support.
| berkes wrote:
| I don't want AI in Firefox.
|
| For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one
| thing and doing that well".
|
| In that vein, I _do_ want Firefox to develop /allow/improve an
| interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my
| firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
|
| So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things
| there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my
| bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that
| some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and
| start spamming under my account.
|
| Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play
| in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to
| interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building
| clients please: do one thing and do it well.
| jy14898 wrote:
| I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web
| browser, you don't use it compositionally.
| cwillu wrote:
| But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_
| use arbitrary things compositionally.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program
| antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program
| that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev
| tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new
| AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good
| decision or not).
| anuramat wrote:
| by this logic sockets are also non-unix
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > you don't use it compositionally.
|
| I would if I could!
| yoavm wrote:
| Nothing really stops you from doing curl | awk , but you
| probably aren't.
| vidarh wrote:
| We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of
| the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.
|
| But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with
| filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I want a browser with a simple set of command line options
| that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some
| part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do
| with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it
| without having to install huge unstable things like
| Playwright and similar.
| FelipeCortez wrote:
| You can open Chrome with a remote debugging port enabled
| and send commands to it using the Devtools Protocol.
| https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one
| thing and doing that well".
|
| I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or
| indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything
| platform--perhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.
| JohnPDickerson wrote:
| > I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the
| AI landscape that's shaping up.
|
| Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI _not_ specifically
| related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate
| public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is
| supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source,
| general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what
| we 're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more
| trusted automated interfacing between machines.
|
| A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-
| enabled systems that interact with each other and with the
| Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other
| way.
|
| You may enjoy some of our projects:
| https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack
| sorcercode wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. I want responsible AI and i would
| expect Mozilla to lead the way on how to do this when it comes to
| browsers (they were pioneers when it came to containers and
| privacy control).
|
| Here's some ways I can think of:
|
| - seamless integration with local models
|
| - opt in and opt out experience when needed
|
| - ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)
|
| - ai and accessibility
|
| these are off the top of my head.
|
| it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI
| doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.
|
| I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it
| doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the
| announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and
| short sighted.
| agentultra wrote:
| Clearly it's not, "nobody."
|
| But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated
| with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent
| releases.
|
| You can't be all things to all people.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| I think fewer and fewer people want Mozilla in their Firefox ;)
| Maybe we'll get a better non-profit organization make a Firefox
| fork at some point.
| rs186 wrote:
| There is zero money in making a browser.
| liminal wrote:
| Publishers are using AI to generate pages. I want AI to extract
| the worthwhile bits. Why shouldn't users have tools too?
| gmuslera wrote:
| "nobody"... of the vocal ones.
|
| Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering
| about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could
| affect much more than just privacy.
| moontear wrote:
| Go to about:config and set browser.ml.enabled to false and throw
| in browser.ml.chat.enabled (false) for good measure. Done.
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| You'd think so, but you also need to set browser.ml.chat.menu
| to false to remove a context menu item.
| moontear wrote:
| Looking at https://searchfox.org/firefox-
| main/source/browser/components... it is a bit weird, that
| there isn't a general check for browser.ml.enabled
| true/false.
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| Yeah, there should really just be one global setting.
|
| Also note that it's browser.ml.enable (no "d") vs.
| browser.ml.chat.enabled, to make matters even more
| infuriating.
| Krssst wrote:
| I think the option to disable the context menu item is right
| in said context menu. Best place to put the option honestly,
| I wish all AI features had a disable button right next to
| them.
| altcognito wrote:
| People don't want AI passively lurking in the background
| extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming
| for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
|
| I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.
|
| Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just
| the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of
| mass surveillance (and control) architecture.
| riskable wrote:
| > People don't want AI passively lurking in the background
| extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are
| aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
|
| Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I
| know, there's only two companies doing what you describe:
| Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and
| evil) by a huge amount--because it's at the OS level.
| altcognito wrote:
| Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in
| expanding the scope without saying as much.
|
| Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but
| Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has
| integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of
| course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity,
| Arc etc...
|
| The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in
| the background without you really knowing whether they are
| active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies,
| javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using
| the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)
|
| So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is
| encouraging the use of local models, they are just
| encouraging the development of the same technology that has
| gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they
| should continue the work that meta started -- support
| development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI
| feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.
|
| [1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
| TimByte wrote:
| I get that Mozilla's trying to stay relevant in a changing
| landscape, but maybe listening to their core users is the
| competitive edge
| nba456_ wrote:
| i do
| heldrida wrote:
| Maybe there are people higher up with a lot of money who force
| these features. At the end of the day, the builders have the
| obey.
| rs186 wrote:
| Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional
| choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little
| bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome
| or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are
| choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer
| features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with
| Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better
| adblocking and full control of the browser.
|
| Why would they want AI?
| homebrewer wrote:
| Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel).
| It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+
| until relatively recently.
|
| It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works
| inside nested scrollable elements.
| mrits wrote:
| After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few
| years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad
| blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no
| part in a company even considering it
| noir_lord wrote:
| They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and
| it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and
| Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the
| v3 manifest limitations.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty
| good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that
| platform.
|
| It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent
| adblocking is a huge feature.
|
| For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but
| most techy users have already got that figured out.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Everything but web games which almost always perform better
| on chrome. Probably not Firefox's fault 95% of the time
| though
| nativeit wrote:
| I can't figure out why they couldn't just fund a first-party
| extension to add AI features.
| clueless wrote:
| World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-
| style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no
| corporate overload, on and on....
|
| Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D
| nativeit wrote:
| I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is
| basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary
| browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some
| devices with ESPHome or something.
| adolph wrote:
| I think using AI to adjust the salience landscape of a web page
| (aka ad blocking) would be welcomed.
| kgwxd wrote:
| If they did things right, it shouldn't matter. Default Firefox
| should be nothing but a browser, everything else should be an
| extension. And Mozilla should be beholden to the same
| restrictions every other extension developer is.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Only reason Firefox has 2% market share is that Mozilla's leaders
| keep listening to a tiny, loud minority of extremely online
| luddites instead of delivering actual users what they want. The
| anti-AI set on HN is the same set that claims users want feature
| phones, not smartphones. They'd probably also be against long-
| distance telephone lines and the wheel.
| strictnein wrote:
| I mean, who were they listening to when they acquired Pocket
| and integrated it into Firefox? Or decided to build their own
| video chat service? Or an encrypted file sharing service? Or
| Persona, Firefox OS, Firefox Hello, etc etc. These weren't just
| bad decisions in retrospect, these were clearly bad decisions
| at the time.
|
| https://killedbymozilla.com/
| daemonologist wrote:
| The built-in translate is nice. The LLM stuff I don't use, but as
| long as it's tucked away in its own sidebar I don't mind.
| dmantis wrote:
| As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any
| issues with that.
|
| E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API
| with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by
| local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone
| clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd
| have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking
| recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but
| why do I care for my local single-user usage?
|
| I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing
| challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.
|
| If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in
| everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say
| it's a good design from Mozilla's side.
| vidarh wrote:
| Yeah, I just gave an example elsewhere of turning a Notion page
| into a JSON object, that Claude Code trivially did with
| Playwright, but that'd be far nicer if I could just click a
| button to talk about the current page. I'd be happy for it to
| be sandboxed, as long as it's easily accessible.
|
| Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally
| I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll
| settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a _lot_ of people
| 's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it,
| and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would
| be a gamechanger.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I also wondered about this. Mozilla pushed out some AI buttons.
|
| I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.
|
| I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a
| browser.
|
| The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more
| marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the
| expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why
| Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla
| wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai
| integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla
| is doing the right thing here, the features are there but
| unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do
| whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small
| market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to
| become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
| isodev wrote:
| > "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and
| more the norm
|
| Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot
| thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on
| this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Another example of "nobody I know" and not nobody.
| isodev wrote:
| You didn't read the article, did you? This was explained
| very well. It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other
| medium or social you check. Not a single example of "not
| techbros" actually want the stuff.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I'm not a techbro and I want this. I know other people
| who aren't techbros who want it as well. So what makes
| your anecdotal evidence any stronger than mine? Maybe you
| and the author shouldn't be speaking for everyone.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other
| medium or social you check._
|
| That tells more about your socials than anything else. I
| personally know plenty of non-technical folks using
| ChatGPT (because it's the only buzzword they know) to
| augment their browsing in an awkward manner. They want
| utility, they don't give a damn about anyone's
| sentiments.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| That's a _ridiculous_ hyperbole. Translation and search alone
| are examples of wildly successful applications of generative
| AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the
| experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if
| you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-
| powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode
| in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
| isodev wrote:
| No, they're examples of misuse of LLMs - "sometimes
| correct" is not a replacement for a search engine or a
| translator.
|
| Remember, Google search used to actually find you things
| before they shifted to replacing results with "somewhat
| random but reads plausible" AI summaries.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude
| and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by
| orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can
| finally rely on correct machine translation when reading
| articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to
| people in their native language. They still miss some
| nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure
| it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate
| the rest.
|
| _> replacing results with "somewhat random but reads
| plausible" AI summaries_
|
| I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the
| sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm
| considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle
| but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted
| and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel
| videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual
| issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing
| bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes.
| And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-
| English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans,
| Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and
| providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me
| insane amount of time.
|
| Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty
| surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing
| this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful
| thinking.
| nativeit wrote:
| Maybe talk to the recently resigned Japanese translation
| team leader about how good AI translations are.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| They are miles better than the ordinary machine
| translators. That's all that matters, because I can't
| afford a personal human translator to browse the web.
|
| Human translation is obviously better, but not by much,
| especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs
| for pretty complex translations all the time, in
| languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally
| communicate with me in my native language using an LLM.
| It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially
| if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong
| multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop
| generation, as the input is from a human.
|
| That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his
| hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not
| related to the point I'm making.
| isodev wrote:
| If you tell this to someone who has never used LLMs/AI
| they may be curious. I have though. I also understand how
| the technology works and that you will have to read those
| research papers yourself anyway, verify every source,
| check every fact (including the ones that got omitted).
| Maybe it's better than previous gen machine translation,
| but you better not rely on context and subtle sentiments
| being translated as intended all the time.
|
| If it's important, it's still better to do it yourself
| (or pay for the service of another human).
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I myself can see using that some day. I was dismissive of AI-
| assisted search results, now I'm back to using google search
| most of the time over duckduckgo, because of quality. I don't
| want to be forced to abandon firefox down the road. Every
| feature they add,from pocket,vpns, to this, is optional. Just
| don't use it. Let firefox get more marketshare. It's the only
| Google alternative.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| You didn't even read 6 sentences into TFA. 52/52 of the closed-
| beta testers of this feature want it removed.
| clueless wrote:
| how is 52 users representative??
| rng-concern wrote:
| If they are purely random, it's damning. Flip a coin until
| you get heads 52 times in a row.
| everfree wrote:
| I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from
| 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser
| beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on
| the Mozilla Connect forum.
|
| The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from
| moderately positive to extremely negative. People who
| feel moderately about something don't usually bother
| posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
| burnte wrote:
| It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it
| significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52
| definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said
| no.
| dwedge wrote:
| I'm fairly sure the 52 are comments to their announcement
| and not beta testers. There may be some overlap but not
| enough data to say 100%
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell
| you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai
| browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of
| it or get left behind.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this
| statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you
| get 52 identical results, _even with population bias_ ,
| you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so,
| but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning.
| Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about
| Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the
| core audience, representing the _existing_ user base that
| you 're going to piss off if their poll result is a
| unanimous "no".
|
| So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user
| base over this is fine because they can attracting enough
| new users with AI to compensate then this result should be
| all the evidence they need that this is the wrong
| direction.
|
| Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space
| for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche
| audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that
| got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely
| Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play
| to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a
| management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that
| are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to
| make Firefox fall off the map completely.
| dwedge wrote:
| They didn't poll 52 people, the 52 are comments
| bakugo wrote:
| > grandma isn't a beta tester
|
| Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and
| probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either.
| And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser"
| is.
|
| If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to
| lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has
| in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But
| this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and
| clicking around.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Who exactly are those closed-beta testers, and what makes you
| think they are representative of the average user?
|
| Before accusing people of not having read TFA maybe you
| should do some critical thinking yourself.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I thought the 52 were just forum randos?
| dwedge wrote:
| I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or
| misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and
| in the next paragraph mention 52 responses _to the
| announcement_ at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from
| anyone. Very different thing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking,
| have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly.
|
| Currently they've at least got one of the three.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| doesn't 3 imply 2? aren't people just affectively asking for
| "something like chrome but with ad blocking"?
|
| what I'm most concerned about is that pretty much all
| browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium's rendering
| engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to
| exist.
| timeinput wrote:
| If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly
| suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know
| enough to put any weight behind that statement.
|
| It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox
| either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically
| default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally
| then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the
| page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.
|
| I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature
| parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never
| have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just
| works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with
| firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other
| sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that
| work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any
| examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but
| they definitely exist.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| They also need to integrate with windows/enterprise setups
| better, that's one of the main reasons people use chrome
| based browsers.
| hbn wrote:
| They really need to work on making an easier transition from
| Chrome if they care about converting users. Add an out of the
| box (preferably default) option to make the tabs look normal
| and not ugly like they are now. Change the private window
| shortcut to Cmd(Ctrl)+Shift+N like every browser has
| standardized on. Also I swear they override the normal text
| input behaviour, specifically if I'm using option+left/right
| arrows to jump between tokens in the URL bar, it jumps my
| cursor to unexpected places, like at the wrong side of
| periods.
|
| Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very
| lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off
| everything Chrome does in that department.
| fullshark wrote:
| They want to browse the internet, and really that means browse
| the three sites they care about. They aren't going to change
| their browser cause of AI capabilities, so ultimately it doesn't
| matter. It's like arguing over whether users want dark mode. Some
| do, it's not going to change market share meaningfully.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Allow me to be a devil's advocate here. I don't natively like AI
| in Firefox. But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has
| a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help
| agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox
| Settings using AI.
|
| Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator
| in web pages and web forums.
|
| Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save
| it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text
| enhanced browser history.
|
| Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in
| each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted
| based on chat requests.
|
| The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that
| actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it
| is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in
| energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox
| won't scour the AI index, unprompted.
|
| Edit: rearranged paragraphs.
| cwillu wrote:
| "But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help
| menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent
| (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings
| using AI."
|
| Dear god, no. The last thing I want to be doing is telling
| grandma over the phone how to sweet-talk the settings screen
| into turning her adblocker back on.
| ufocia wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure I want AI in
| my browser, whatever that may mean, but I don't think everyone
| shares my view. To think otherwise is IMHO delusional.
| mrits wrote:
| Excited to see the all the security issues with the AI features
| leaking data in regular browser mode
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| People say Mozilla should try to make Firefox better to steal
| back usage from Chrome and then they say stuff like "nobody want
| AI in Firefox". Like it or not, AI it's here and if you want your
| browser to reach more users some AI will be required.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Meanwhile a badly behaving page doesn't just maim the tab content
| area but freezes the whole browser. I've been using Firefox
| because my Chrome install got borked so I've used that to try
| giving FF a real try. I feel like I regularly have to get it out
| of my way. Maybe fix the browser first.
| flatline wrote:
| A more cynical take/question: is Mozilla just pursuing these
| initiatives because their corporate sponsors need to push AI
| everywhere they can to justify their burn, in the hopes that a
| profitable use case eventually arises with a sufficient user base
| accustomed to the technology to pay for it?
| captainkrtek wrote:
| AI as a word now even puts me off. Every podcast ad read, every
| news story, every linkedin post. It's exhausting
|
| I can't roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like "How can
| agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?"
| throwA29B wrote:
| Can't wait for the Ladybird to arrive.
| dana321 wrote:
| ChatGPT Atlas, anyone?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| > We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your
| online experience smoother, more helpful, _and more profitable
| for us because we can sell your data!_
|
| Fixed that for you greed dbags.
| kburman wrote:
| Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they
| want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money
| into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone's
| resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with
| Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care
| about.
|
| This isn't innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy
| distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps
| slipping behind. And it's happening because there's no real
| oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say "no" when
| someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
|
| Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on
| experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is
| acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the
| organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until
| that happens, they're just wasting donor money and goodwill while
| Firefox slowly fades away.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a
| reason to exist: building a great browser
|
| Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to
| their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
| nativeit wrote:
| I keep hearing this, but I haven't seen any convincing
| evidence there are no alternatives.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think it would have to be alternative search licenses,
| crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering.
|
| There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on
| the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The
| examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the
| largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year
| internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half
| of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So
| Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest
| crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes
| crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option.
|
| I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that
| pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two.
|
| So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk
| being inconsequential, compromising core mission values
| (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand
| accused of losing track of their mission. I personally
| wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a
| drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get
| accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know
| how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I
| do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth
| trying.
|
| Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some
| Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out
| of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the
| most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I
| have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another
| example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on
| their core mission.
| glenstein wrote:
| This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into
| every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the
| facts one more time:
|
| (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever
| have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
|
| (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't
| actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core
| browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
|
| (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side
| bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't
| retroactively cause the market share losses.
|
| (4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features
| drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely
| zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search
| and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which
| likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
|
| (5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is
| somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era,
| but then they _did the dang thing_ and launched a major
| engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of
| the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering
| transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing
| everyone asked for. It 's obviously not perfect, but in terms
| of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a
| daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic
| disrepair.
|
| (6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain
| what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all
| their market share overnight.
|
| That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is
| bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error),
| dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its
| current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue
| grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they
| didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader
| advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and
| Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering
| resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I
| would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right
| now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
|
| So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this
| iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera
| back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the
| comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream
| territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent
| historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and
| effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
| exographicskip wrote:
| Thanks for this. Used Firefox since 1.0. Donate to their non-
| profit arm every month.
|
| Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a
| vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions.
|
| Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.
| creatonez wrote:
| > The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side
| bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't
| retroactively cause the market share losses.
|
| I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few
| things that were before 2020:
|
| Firefox OS: 2013
|
| Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
|
| Directory Tiles: 2014
|
| Pocket acquisition: 2015
|
| Firefox Focus: 2015
|
| Cliqz experiment: 2017
|
| "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
| kburman wrote:
| You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about
| budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.
|
| > (1) They spend more on browser development now...
|
| Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency,
| not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market
| share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point
| that leadership is failing.
|
| > (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that
| much...
|
| This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab"
| is trivial. The _opportunity cost_ in leadership attention,
| engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can 't
| fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
|
| > (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
|
| This is a red herring. The issue isn't the _initial_ loss to
| Chrome 's rise; it's the _ongoing_ failure to regain ground.
| That failure correlates directly with a pattern of
| distractions (which you yourself list).
|
| > (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its...
| monopolies...
|
| The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely _why_ focus is so
| critical. It 's the strongest argument _against_ dabbling in
| side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a
| giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
|
| > (5) ...they _did the dang thing_ and launched... Project
| Quantum...
|
| You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example
| proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by
| 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a _focused_ effort.
| Why is today 's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook
| (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
|
| > (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
|
| This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic
| feature." The request is for leadership to _stop_ distracting
| the organization with things that _aren 't_ the browser.
|
| You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you
| immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting
| projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is
| bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox
| OS... cost engineering resources").
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| I don't understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus
| on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team
| is anemic.
|
| Then there's Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team
| focused on performance and maintaining standards.
| nunez wrote:
| I meant what were they expecting? A bunch of their privacy-wonk
| userbase to go "Oh shit; I'm finally gonna go all-in on the slop
| now that Mozilla's doing AI?"
|
| Like, what were they thinking?
|
| I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it
| all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item
| appear in my right-click context menu.
| amoss wrote:
| I would prefer that contenteditable divs with multi-line contents
| would handle newlines in a consistent manner instead of the
| chaotic mess we have now. But I guess that doesn't pump stock
| valuations so AI slop it is.
| 1gn15 wrote:
| I hate it when authors claim to speak for everyone.
| napolux wrote:
| I like the AI support in Firefox. It's there, useful and when I
| don't want to use it, I don't use it.
|
| As a ChatGPT subscriber I use it more since when I can just open
| a dedicated sidebar in Firefox with ChatGPT inside.
| InMice wrote:
| Features that theyd be more dignified to offer as plugins if they
| had it.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I don't want AI anywhere, but it seems I cannot open any of my
| familiar applications without having to stumble over their new,
| stupid "AI" button. It has become quite infuriating.
| melagonster wrote:
| Actually, AI in edge is not bad.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I wish these features were added as extensions that you could
| uninstall vs being baked in.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Mozilla spending their limited resources on something so absurd
| and irrelevant seems extremely strange.
|
| People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software
| with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is
| making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep
| working on tools which further help user privacy.
|
| Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have
| the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will
| make it just a worse version of another browser.
|
| To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of
| Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based
| on. I doubt that it is actual user research.
| 65 wrote:
| Boy am I excited for the Ladybird alpha release. We won't have to
| deal with Chromium browsers, Safari, or Firefox anymore.
| markbao wrote:
| Most of the loudest critics - and, I've found, many commenters on
| HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology
| users. To think that _nobody_ wants these features isn't based on
| what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using
| ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already
| exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more "I
| don't like AI and everyone else should agree" rather than "the
| data shows that nobody likes AI".
|
| Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton
| of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text
| box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal
| with that PR fallout?).
| cyral wrote:
| Had to scroll way too far to find a comment like this.
| Unfortunately HN famously doesn't understand what the average
| consumer wants. The Dropbox comment comes to mind.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features
| until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the
| reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in
| tech.
|
| I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined
| to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to
| google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash
| here.
|
| Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and
| then turning out to be wrong?
|
| Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by
| Dropbox, the band.
| markbao wrote:
| The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I
| was writing my original comment.
|
| Here is the reference:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox
| was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup
| that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would
| actually want to use (and yes, that's still a few hundred
| thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Much appreciated. :)
|
| Edit: shame it wasn't about the band and the song though.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Based on how many of these are there now, it's obvious _some_
| people want these features. I don 't know the numbers, but some
| people obviously do want to chat with their browser now.
| jccx70 wrote:
| lol, another AI, another LLM, oh yes I did good at this job
| interview (bunch of python code that you can copy from
| anywhere)... I am happy, I'm on linux and I have FF updates
| disabled.
| AnonHP wrote:
| Unfortunately there's no winning for Mozilla.
|
| Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the
| current state of "AI" and where it's headed, the undeniable fact
| is that "AI" has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will
| continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla
| Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the
| general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in
| Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does
| something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms
| about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has
| had more than a few over the years).
|
| What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse
| audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It's not
| easy. I'd rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail
| instead of just being left behind due to inaction.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not
| aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally
| client side but at the very least I need to understand what is
| sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent
| when I actively trigger the feature).
|
| In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate
| tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated
| otherwise.
|
| But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be
| useful.
|
| I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people
| who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be
| interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at
| every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I want as little AI in my life as possible, and I certainly want
| zero of it forced on me.
| elAhmo wrote:
| It is just a question of how long can Mozilla hold its ground
| with useless initiatives like this which are not what their core
| user base wants.
|
| Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a
| ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on
| those core products.
| exploderate wrote:
| What, of course we do?
|
| Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to
| another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating
| research sessions, by searching and organizing...
| anuramat wrote:
| counterpoint: I want AI in firefox
|
| there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested
| more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers;
| why are people so triggered? because it _might_ end up being bad?
| jajuuka wrote:
| AI is unfortunately an umbrella term which people can project
| what they want on to. For reasonable people like yourself it's
| a tool to accomplish tasks. While for someone else it might be
| CoPilot showing up frequently and they don't disable or turn
| off the notifications and just get continually frustrated.
| PanoptesYC wrote:
| Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox,
| it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features
| opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by
| default.
|
| I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those
| features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing
| stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available
| and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI
| would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs
| and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of
| configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user
| respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not
| something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla
| rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human
| translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves"
| in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self.
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
|
| [2] https://www.instagram.com/p/DPn_Re5AAkN/
| metabagel wrote:
| > every site is broken
|
| If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers.
| In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider
| "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.
|
| Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing
| to use their browser if you can avoid it.
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| Mozilla is an advertising company too. In terms of breakage,
| Im talking about more fundamental things like missing APIs
| and wrong rendering.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I want AI in Firefox. Blog disproven.
| natnatenathan wrote:
| The reason I don't want AI integrated into my browser (or really
| anything else) is that the mental model for big tech moved from
| "providing value" to "capturing value" about 15 years ago, and I
| expect they will try to use this integration in an attempt to
| build a layer between the customer and all downstream services
| (stores, banks, information) so they can extract some form of tax
| on every transaction (ads, micro-fees), all while consolidating
| data about me to create new sources of revenue. I am one of those
| 'bright minds' who has wasted their talent improving marketing
| conversion by 0.001% instead of working to cure cancer. (Let's be
| honest, improvements are _way_ better than 0.001%, I am good at
| my job).
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| All Mozilla cares about is how to slurp your data. They are just
| a unit of Google with a different name.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| Even if LLMs seem to have reached their limits, and are no longer
| on the feature path towards AGI, I have a fundamental (possibly
| irrational) dislike for anything labeled AI, just in case this
| does become a stepping stone towards AGI.
|
| On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any
| product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into
| my life without invitation.
|
| In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us
| sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced
| advertising or digital currency for that matter.
| fruitworks wrote:
| I do. I find the translation features useful
| topaz0 wrote:
| Lots of commenters replying with 'actually some people want
| this', or 'actually _I_ want this '.
|
| Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that _when
| mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from
| the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI
| integration in the browser_. That at least indicates that the
| people who are actively following firefox development are
| substantially against this kind of feature. It 's not just "I and
| the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important
| subset of firefox power users don't want it.
|
| In other words, the people that are actively going out of their
| way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the
| browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that
| there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click
| away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based
| on having access to such things... to which I say... really???
| But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who
| will choose _firefox_ over whatever corporate-captured competitor
| is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.
|
| Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some
| other commenters, is that, whether or not people _do_ want this,
| they _shouldn 't_ want it. It is bad for users and for the world
| to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are
| rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be
| ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the
| true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.
| beezle wrote:
| I go back to pre-Firefox Mozilla browsers. What I want is faster,
| less bloat and far better memory management - a corrorlary is
| probably 'fix all outstanding bugs'. Were it me, I'd put a
| moratorium of three years on adding anything new, AI in
| particular.
|
| As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr
| 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M
|
| Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears
| unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is
| not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a
| killer.
| nathias wrote:
| why not? chatGPT frontend/ux is terrible, there should be
| thousands of alternatives
| resfirestar wrote:
| >What strikes me as odd is the decision to position itself as
| just another AI-enabled web browser, picking a fight with big
| techs and better-funded startups whose users are less hostile
| (and sometimes enthusiastic) about adding AI to web browsing.
|
| By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing
| with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight
| with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't
| stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that
| was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends
| years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the
| vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as
| proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.
| antonyh wrote:
| How much is BigAI paying Moz to integrate these things? I has to
| be about the dollar surely?
| vmesel wrote:
| Muito bom ver um texto de um Brasileiro em numero 1 aqui!
| Parabens Rodrigo!
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in
| this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over
| a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently
| switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i
| stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely
| different UI after all this time.
| submeta wrote:
| I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning
| every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their
| core value at best, and damaging them at worst.
|
| Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and
| wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have
| always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find
| the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window,
| just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
|
| Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to
| become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
|
| And now Firefox.
|
| Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my
| preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire
| product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something
| genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort
| to save itself.
|
| Firefox instead _desperately_ needs to focus on making it a high
| performance browser that people enjoy using for..... _browsing_.
|
| They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously
| awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
|
| Signed, a 20 year user.
| rpgbr wrote:
| I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in,
| system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them,
| since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it.
| It dreads me how "un-macOS" Firefox feels, and I guess this
| feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn't
| really stand out like it does on MacOS.
|
| 97% of Windows users wouldn't notice if it followed OS
| conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was
| following the current conventions instead of copying Word
| 2003 :)
| paradox460 wrote:
| Firefox has always felt rather bad on Mac. Ages ago they made
| Camino, which was basically "aqua Firefox" and it was nice.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Is it really that big of a task? More so than maintaining
| custom spellcheck dictionaries in every supported language?
| Even if they only implemented OS spellcheck compatibility on
| MacOS and Windows and just used the existing custom
| spellcheck on other OSes, that'd still be a huge improvement
| and they'd only have to do the work for two OSes rather than
| every OS that Firefox supports.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can
| steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side
| split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a
| light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and
| text reader modes.
|
| There are so many improvements that can make the browsing
| experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least
| some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another
| sidebar.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| They can steal Workspaces from Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal the built-in RSS client form Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal the ability to save sessions from Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal the built-in notes from Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal the tab stacking from Vivaldi.
|
| Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
|
| Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
|
| Not being so weirdly buggy on Windows. It's my main browser
| but man does it have odd behaviors that need restarts
| occasionally.
| ethmarks wrote:
| > Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
|
| Firefox already has vertical tabs and they work great.
|
| > Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
|
| I'm pretty sure that Firefox has profile switching in some
| capacity, although I don't personally use it and can't
| vouch for it.
|
| As for the rest of these, I agree completely. Firefox has
| too many wacky AI experiments and not enough normal browser
| features.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Mozilla will never be able to compete with Google, Microsoft or
| OpenAI - heck even Perplexity - for AI features in a browser.
| They shouldn't even try.
|
| I've been test driving Waterfox and at this point I don't think
| I'll be going back.
| egorfine wrote:
| I think they're damned if they do ("who the fuck wants AI in
| everything") and damned if they don't ("Mozilla is so irrelevant
| they didn't even tried the AI race")
| esskay wrote:
| It's a browser. A browser does not need AI baked in.
| Extensions/addons? Sure, go for it, the more the merrier. But
| forcing it on people was always going to be a daft move,
| especially for Mozilla who have completely lost their whole
| "We're not as bad as Google" schtick over the last few years.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I wouldn't mind an AI ad-blocker. I just don't want it to futz
| with the actual content.
| ineptech wrote:
| The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in
| the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning
| capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1%
| market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter
| how useful the features might be.
| everfree wrote:
| Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's
| massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a
| regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that
| Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is
| that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls
| funding and Firefox is toast.
|
| So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google
| products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a
| company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor
| that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is
| bikeshedding.
| vaadu wrote:
| I want a browser to prioritize speed, standards, stability and
| security.
|
| All other features should come via add-ons.
|
| Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to
| Mozilla's AI.
| everfree wrote:
| What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't
| host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.
| squarefoot wrote:
| For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be
| available when I need it as external loadable module (extension?
| plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not
| because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is
| being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search
| agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless
| of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as
| LibreWolf and others will remove that.
| roughly wrote:
| > Mozilla, after all, likely has a clearer view of the whole user
| base.
|
| This assertion is relying on facts not in evidence.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Google has an "AI Overview" whenever you search for something,
| and this is probably what Mozilla wants to enable. I think your
| average person will find it useful.
|
| Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when
| it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf
| club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages
| of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1)
| reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs
| depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually
| critical and you should be researching it more in depth.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Contrarian here. I've fell in love with Firefox's AI Chatbox
| sidebar. It's extremely helpful to have Gemini immediately
| available to help with translating and summarizing text.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| I've been a Firefox user for 5 years or so and I can tell you:
| yes no one needs AI in Firefox especially that Firefox users tend
| to be on the privacy conscious side of things
|
| But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share,
| and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?
| DrSiemer wrote:
| If it's really hidden in its own special tab and NEVER comes out
| unwanted, I can see some benefits.
|
| It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run
| on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue.
| Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my
| data the product.
| codyb wrote:
| I use Firefox Developer Edition as my daily driver and it's a
| nice experience. I think there's an AI option in the settings I
| have turned off? Wolud
|
| I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have
| found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a
| bit more over time.
|
| My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.
| Bender wrote:
| I can only speak for myself. I do not want yet more bloat added
| to applications. With that bloat comes more vulnerabilities,
| maybe intentional or otherwise. _" Ooopsie did we leak your
| ______ to the world? Gosh, we're so sorry."_ Enough already, just
| be a web browser. Keep it simple with the only dependency being
| the site I am visiting.
| busymom0 wrote:
| The only place I can think of where I might actually find AI
| useful but AI is simply not there yet is for the browser to
| analyze the page super quickly and remove junk - ads, analytics,
| cookie prompts, too much extra spacing, "AI mode" buttons, the
| microphone button on YouTube search, YouTube Shorts and community
| posts etc. Basically, I should be able to tell AI to remove
| something and it should be able to do it instantly.
|
| The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.
| webdoodle wrote:
| I don't want AI to have any of my data. Past, present or future.
| everfree wrote:
| I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in
| a minority.
|
| * I summarize articles.
|
| * When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI
| what I'm missing.
|
| * When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread
| it for me.
|
| * When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn
| the features.
|
| * When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer
| could have possibly intended.
|
| Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge
| leaps in my productivity.
|
| Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something
| like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to
| me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy,
| lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full
| control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control
| over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the
| data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have
| confidence that the rest of my data stays private.
|
| The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are
| unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I
| don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have
| struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as
| to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-
| related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your
| browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings.
| Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this
| is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features -
| in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones
| forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.
|
| As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in
| terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my
| daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at
| some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be
| done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather
| than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That
| would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't
| want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.
|
| And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread
| any part of this post. This one's all me.
| Krssst wrote:
| > The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with
| that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off
| permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and
| menu.
|
| It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go
| straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that
| is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI
| can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
| nativeit wrote:
| How about it leaving it disabled and letting me enable it
| immediately if/when I choose.
| everfree wrote:
| This is a strange concept to me.
|
| When companies add additional features to a product I use,
| I generally want to be notified about them so that I can
| make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled
| or disabled.
| abhi555shek wrote:
| We're quickly moving from AI being a work helper to being the
| worst distraction of all times! Why Mozilla, why?
| ajkjk wrote:
| I think the underlying motivation here is that employees at
| Mozilla want to deliver big projects to get promoted / recognized
| / advance their careers. The fundamental "cause" for the
| misanthropic behavior is a perverse incentive structure. In my
| head I associate it with the "OKR" framework: when you're
| evaluated on "delivering recognizable projects" (regardless of
| value; it benefits everybody to _pretend_ they have value)
| instead of "doing your job well" (whatever it is, whether
| glamorous or not) then you end up with bizarre corporate
| behaviors like this.
|
| It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the
| company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since
| they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for
| delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings
| for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if
| they can _invent_ recognizable deliverables, because the whole
| chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting /
| hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is
| pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from
| everyone else also pretending.
|
| But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing
| is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing
| well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is
| pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best
| thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it
| completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to
| survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even
| likes it.
|
| None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so
| much free money going around. If you have to do an _actually_
| good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment,
| you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress
| the board /executives/big donors.
|
| The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive
| structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of
| public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like
| delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public
| companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such
| a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-
| nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of
| bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.
|
| (Probably there are a few other things driving this framework
| also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople
| to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as
| clueless about what makes software good for the users as
| everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from
| executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I
| refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI
| initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm
| convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have
| to to keep their jobs.)
|
| This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so
| inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do
| the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS.
| But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still
| getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this
| industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway
| because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh.
| And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by
| accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it
| and _for some reason that works_ because for mysterious and
| probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that
| either.
|
| Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so
| disappointing.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Doesn't torbrowser use firefox? I wonder how a journalist could
| trust it if there's some obscure llm/ai involved?
| everfree wrote:
| Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to
| bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll
| just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any
| of Firefox's AI code or functionality.
| phplovesong wrote:
| Fuck, AI slop is literally everywhere. You need to go really deep
| to avoid it these days.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| if my car comes with the ability to start normally but also an
| alternate mode where, by deisgn, it explodes and kills my entire
| family is that providing me with freedom of choice in my
| automobile experience? am I in control because I have the option
| to do things I would never under any circumstances actually want
| to do? or is someone trying to convince me that i'm in charge
| because I get to pick from a menu they wrote?
| cptskippy wrote:
| > They're calling it "Window AI."
|
| Was this intentional or just a complete lack of attention to
| detail? Even their own screenshot contradicts this.
|
| Does it matter? Yes. "Window AI" suggests there is an AI manager,
| where as "AI Window" suggests an isolated environment.
| jlarocco wrote:
| It kills me that they leave out features desired by more or less
| everybody (like ad-block), while they add completely superfluous
| features like AI and Pocket to the core of Firefox.
|
| It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a
| plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in
| their browser.
| dwheeler wrote:
| I _love_ having built-in _local_ natural language translation
| implemented by AI, which Firefox provides. Local models have
| different properties than remote properties, and natural language
| translation is a _useful_ thing. AI should be added when it
| solves a real need, and the risks can be minimized (or at least
| controlled). The goal shouldn 't be to use AI, the goal should be
| to solve problems for humans.
| nativeit wrote:
| Lol.
|
| > Could Not Give Kudos
|
| >Kudos could not be given to the message for the following
| reason: > Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed
| messages per minute.
|
| Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to
| fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.
| visarga wrote:
| > I think nobody wants AI in Firefox
|
| I think the author does not speak for me
| im3w1l wrote:
| I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well
| though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local
| model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off
| sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I
| wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs
| at all).
|
| I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Speak for yourself, I _do_ want to see Mozilla experimenting with
| new features and functionality opened up by new technology.
| Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more
| than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be _trying_ new
| things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It 's new
| technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla
| _should_ be on the forefront of figuring it out.
| creatonez wrote:
| Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's
| a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the
| multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing.
|
| Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially
| cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it
| doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and
| local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
| burnte wrote:
| The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it
| going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read?
| Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate
| images of the webpage for me?
|
| AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every
| circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think
| of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a
| good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!"
| features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is
| absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar
| extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you
| could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was
| literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam
| URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
|
| I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer
| (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI
| lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn
| on a light!).
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _What 's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it
| for me to read?_
|
| In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I
| find that having a quick chat about a document after
| reading it is a good way to interrogate my own
| understanding of the document.
|
| I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do
| think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox
| users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may
| inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future.
| You've got to walk before you can run.
| nulld3v wrote:
| It's nice for extracting data from a page into some
| structured format (e.g. CSV). Much quicker than trying to
| whip up a JS script or something.
| sejje wrote:
| > 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add
| webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on
| multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage
| in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is
| the exact same thing, except an LLM.
|
| Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your
| little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so
| they're more likely to need it than you.
|
| It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what
| you can personally imagine. As if someone could have
| predicted your webcam use-case.
| janpio wrote:
| Probably that it's a decent first step, with a well defined
| feature set and user expectations, so a nice thing to try
| before they figure out what to do next. And the article this
| comment thread is about is a reaction to one of their
| announcements in that regard:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/
| mavamaarten wrote:
| An AI that automatically clicks through cookie walls,
| declining everything: yes please!
|
| Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| AI overuse drives me crazy but the steelman is that new
| technologies often involve a cringe experimentation phase
| before they find their "killer apps."
|
| E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam
| powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing
| machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses
| of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories
| changed the world.
| TZubiri wrote:
| But LLMs became possible precisely due to centralized server,
| their economies of scale, and their capacity to train on user
| data. All of which are against the core tenets of locality,
| privacy and low cost (gratis) of FOSS.
|
| Sorry guys, but this one is not for you. Unless you go all in
| on microchips so powerful that they enable local LLMs, but even
| that seems to be outside of the FOSS competency as it involves
| hardware, which FOSS doesn't usually touch (with the exception
| of raspberry pi's and some libre phones)
| mikkupikku wrote:
| This is precisely the sort of political demand for stagnation
| that I'm talking about. Doing your best to make RMS proud
| isn't going to make this technology go away.
| bloppe wrote:
| Just because we don't want Mozilla to waste precious resources
| developing clearly unwanted features _does not_ mean we don 't
| want them to experiment. This isn't experimentation. It's being
| a sheep.
| lone-cloud wrote:
| I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of
| this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all
| the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are
| "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many
| years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I
| remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for
| a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the
| type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that
| by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as
| with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to
| add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out
| all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way,
| all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious
| competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due
| to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that
| there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few
| years.
| exographicskip wrote:
| Ladybird might be a good alternative in a couple years
| mmaunder wrote:
| "We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your
| online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the
| everyday disruptions that break your flow."
|
| You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful,
| free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's
| intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop
| is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that
| actually is - in the browser.
| fortyseven wrote:
| The sidebar where I can integrate my own locally hosted LLM? So I
| can quickly grab summaries and stuff? THAT'S helpful. The rest,
| get the hell away.
| 51Cards wrote:
| Please make AI disappear altogether until I want it. No pop-ups,
| no floating "Help me..." in fields, no spinning flashing icons on
| toolbars. I submit feedback on all products that do this that I
| would like a way to turn it all off. AI is useful when I want it,
| otherwise it's just annoying and gets in my way.
| butz wrote:
| Got to hold on just for a few more months until Ladybird release.
| Servo, hopefully will be still catching up. Worst case scenario -
| move to Dillo.
| ulbu wrote:
| why not AI integrations that are not built-in but rather
| externalized like LSP?
| themicahshell wrote:
| The only people who want AI in anything are AI companies...
| boombapoom wrote:
| we respect your privacy, except for when we dump it into a
| publicly shared LLM
| mehdibl wrote:
| May be Mozilla have a point.
|
| Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information
| and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision
| is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an
| alternative to big players.
|
| Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that
| could bite back.
| duxup wrote:
| While back I figured I should support mozilla and I signed up for
| their VPN. It worked for a while but it felt like a hacky ad-on
| ontop of mulvad and then it just wouldn't work a lot of the time
| and I gave up.
|
| I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.
| rjurney wrote:
| I've tried the Perplexity browser and... I can't figure out what
| it does or how it is better?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Ugh I hate it. The amount of times I accidentally trigger the ui
| to summarize the page is so annoying
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| I want to pull in AI on my own terms and don't want to feel I am
| constantly watched.
| midtake wrote:
| I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just
| want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it
| need to do AI?
|
| Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode,
| which Chrome has had for years.
|
| I _don 't_ want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync,
| Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet
| lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web
| fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader
| mode, put fucking RSS back in.
| gespadas wrote:
| I really hope Mozilla open their eyes and ears and LISTEN to
| their USERS... no one wants AI in Firefox, all we want is a
| better web browser.
|
| Mozilla, you are still on time to reroute your efforts to regain
| the users you'd lost by crap like this.
| racl101 wrote:
| At first I thought it was a bit tragic how Apple kinda fumbled
| AI. Now I think maybe they might have an edge if they were to be
| one of the only big companies not trying to push it into their
| products. Especially MacOS.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Nono, I want AI in my browser, I put chatgpt.com on the address
| bar, and I get AI in my browser.
| eduction wrote:
| I'd love an ai I could ask to pull up a web page I have a
| scattered memory of - I know what it was about but not the name
| of the site it was from, not if it's open in a tab or if I closed
| it an hour ago, or maybe I bookmarked it. Even better if I can
| ask things like "can you find that movie review about some robert
| Downey junior film I read maybe a month ago?"
|
| Whether it will actually do any of those things is another
| question of course.
| hendersoon wrote:
| Google approached this the right way. No, not with "ai mode",
| that sucks. With the Chrome dev tools MCP. You allow AI to
| control the browser if the user opts-in and sets it up.
| riversflow wrote:
| M
| moron4hire wrote:
| I mean, 52 people is a significant proportion of Mozilla's entire
| userbase, so...
| guestbest wrote:
| I looked at the top 25 grossing apps on iOS and Android. There is
| only one explicitly ai app and it's the one that ran a Super Bowl
| commercial, ChatGPT. I don't see the demand from regular
| consumers. When or if it grosses top in the charts then it
| arrived. It's more windows 3.0 than windows 95.
| Fanofilm wrote:
| The onus is on FireFox to deliver "the killer feature". No killer
| feature, nobody will bother with it. Mozilla needs to shift into
| entrepreneurial innovation.
| Animats wrote:
| Unless the AI in a browser can delete all ads for me, I don't
| want it.
| wannabag wrote:
| Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of
| complaints.
|
| I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to
| internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came
| back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything
| and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has
| worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still
| believe in them and their mission even if they have to take
| Google money to exist.
|
| I think that complaints here are just making things worse for
| Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every
| little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said
| about a whole lot of other actors out there.
|
| Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me
| a great browser.
| squigz wrote:
| Lots of people saying things like, "This is not novel; come up
| with new ways to use this technology!" as if that's easy.
|
| Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up
| with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open
| source! Go make it yourself!
| mmis1000 wrote:
| I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless
| it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am
| saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot
| bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory
| when I absolutely don't want it).
|
| Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of
| block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or
| designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.
| skwee357 wrote:
| I don't want AI in my browser. I don't want AI in my thermostat
| app. I don't want AI showed into my face on every website I land.
|
| It honestly feels like a plague worse than ads. At least ads I
| can block in various ways.
| aljgz wrote:
| This is going to be disliked, but it's my opinion:
|
| I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that
| actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.
|
| I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main
| browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when
| needed. I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any
| company that creates a free tool to keep users in their
| ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to
| do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns
| with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to
| one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to
| only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it
| will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?
|
| So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly
| trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while
| keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of
| products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly
| attached to the old ways.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| AI = local = cool
|
| AI = cloud = insecure bullshit
| jameslk wrote:
| I want it, but I have ideas in mind that aren't just a chat
| window bolted to a browser.
|
| Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called
| Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much
| easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they
| preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant
| websites were built for Firefox over IE.
|
| We're facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where's the rebirth
| of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption
| again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will
| flock to it.
| anildash wrote:
| I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who
| are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies _want_ people
| not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem.
| https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
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