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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

#321

Post by cornholio »

amelius wrote: post #301
cornholio wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.

Sure, if the common denominator user is at least as savvy as the entire marketing and strategy departments of these trillion dollar companies, then sure, users will identify products that are not designed according to their best interests and will then perfectly coordinate their purchases so that such products fail in the marketplace. Sure.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#322

Post by 4ggr0 »

i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely different UI after all this time.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#323

Post by redwall_hp »

delecti wrote: post #180
bildung wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not going to defend the youtube captions as good, but even still, I find them incredibly helpful. My hearing is fine, but my processing is rubbish, and having a visual aid to help contextualize the sound is a big help, even when they're a bit wrong. Your point about the caption language is probably right though. It's worse with jargon or proper names, and worse with non-American English speakers. If we they don't…

Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily depends on implied rather than explicit context.

The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot." But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)

Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less about how it's structured.

Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube includes a human-provided translation as captions. Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up entirely.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#324

Post by isodev »

orbital-decay wrote: post #303
isodev wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.

That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator.

Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#325

Post by uoaei »

big_toast wrote: post #217
Sophira wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio (language?) and transcription. Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?

Is it Transformer-based? If not then it's a different beast architecturally.

Audio models tend to be based more on convolutional layers than Transformers in my experience.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#326

Post by red-iron-pine »

kbelder wrote: post #306
RansomStark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An AI specifically customized to pull the recipe out of long rambling cooking blog posts would be great. I'd use that regularly.

that's not "AI" that's just a basic firefox extension, and one that's trivially easy to search for

literally googles first hit for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/jkw62b/i_developed...

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#327

Post by metabagel »

zgk7iqea wrote: post #277

Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves" in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self. […

> every site is broken

If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers. In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.

Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing to use their browser if you can avoid it.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#328

Post by quitit »

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 really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement.

Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:

1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!

1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.

1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?

2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.

2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.

2020s: AI, AI, AI!

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#329

Post by ninalanyon »

vidarh wrote: post #200
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.

I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#330

Post by isodev »

amelius wrote: post #301
cornholio wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.

> according to free market theory

Not once in the history of tech “the free market” has succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots of money from doing something they want.

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