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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

#191

Post by dgacmu »

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

This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"

(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#192

Post by Sophira »

boplicity wrote: post #116
jve wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio, not text, and it can run on your mobile phone.

It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.

[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#193

Post by pissmeself »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #16

I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like response. I tire of all these interfaces.

[dead]

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#194

Post by killerstorm »

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 to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#195

Post by StableAlkyne »

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…

That's where I'm at with these.

I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.

That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#196

Post by chemotaxis »

rpdillon wrote: post #157
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 co…

> before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about

Spoiler: you didn't.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#197

Post by nunez »

I meant what were they expecting? A bunch of their privacy-wonk userbase to go "Oh shit; I'm finally gonna go all-in on the slop now that Mozilla's doing AI?"

Like, what were they thinking?

I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#200

Post by vidarh »

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…

We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.

But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.

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