101–110 of 782 posts
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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."
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.
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.
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,…
They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
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.
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 a…
> 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, copil…
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.
Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more front-and-center over time
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 bookma…