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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

#111

Post by flkiwi »

flatline wrote: post #49
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.

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#112

Post by abdullahkhalids »

aquova wrote: post #23
transcriptase wrote: post #10

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,…

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#113

Post by fullshark »

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#114

Post by lotsofpulp »

vidarh wrote: post #84
rwmj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know its summaries are correct?

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.

Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#115

Post by amarant »

andy99 wrote: post #70
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.

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…

Clippy really is back

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#116

Post by boplicity »

jve wrote: post #43
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…

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#117

Post by prophesi »

berkes wrote: post #63
chironjit wrote: post #46

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…

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

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#118

Post by nashashmi »

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#119

Post by jabroni_salad »

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.

Did you write a comment like this last time a recipe clipper got posted here?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#120

Post by gchamonlive »

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.

I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.
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