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.
I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
21–30 of 782 posts
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#22If 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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#23Nobody 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.
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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#24Does 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.
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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#25Does 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.
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
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#26I 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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#27Nobody 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.
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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#28Does 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#29Does 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.
My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.
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.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#30Nobody ever wants anything in Firefox, but in this case it’s probably especially true.
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".