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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

#151

Post by cwillu »

jy14898 wrote: post #109
berkes wrote: post #50

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…

I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web browser, you don't use it compositionally.

But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_ use arbitrary things compositionally.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#152

Post by nijave »

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?

Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.

It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#153

Post by railka »

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 am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.

Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)

Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.

Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#154

Post by andy99 »

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

I have everything disabled for my personal account. For work, when I looked into it, it had to be disabled centrally by my company.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#155

Post by satvikpendem »

bildung wrote: post #143
boplicity wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still. On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.

There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#156

Post by jasonlotito »

rwmj wrote: post #39
mabedan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know its summaries are correct?

It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add something to this discussion.

How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?

To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article. And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the article says from a headline.

So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are correct enough for the purpose they serve.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#157

Post by rpdillon »

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 want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks.

That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#158

Post by cornholio »

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…

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda

All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.

The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#160

Post by Llamamoe »

amarant wrote: post #115
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…

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