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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

#121

Post by homebrewer »

rs186 wrote: post #86

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 t…

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#122

Post by thih9 »

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…

> 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

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#123

Post by glenstein »

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 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

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#124

Post by distances »

RansomStark wrote: post #25
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.

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 electric…

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?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#125

Post by shevy-java »

jmkni wrote: post #35
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 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

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#127

Post by benterix »

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.

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).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#128

Post by vidarh »

dmantis wrote: post #103

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-response…

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.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#129

Post by cwillu »

thih9 wrote: post #122
andy99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

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?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#130

Post by ortusdux »

vidarh wrote: post #76
andy99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
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