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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#41

Post by tmtvl »

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#42

Post by everdrive »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #29
Adrig wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#43

Post by jve »

everdrive wrote: post #4

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.

> 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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#44

Post by railka »

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#45

Post by rwmj »

torben-friis wrote: post #38

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 fro…

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#46

Post by chironjit »

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)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#47

Post by allan_s »

everdrive wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#48

Post by llarsson »

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#49

Post by flatline »

joelthelion wrote: post #36

I wouldn't mind being able to quickly ask an llm about the page I'm browsing or some text I select.

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#50

Post by berkes »

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.

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