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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

#481

Post by mbonnet »

lukan wrote: post #280
rollcat wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com. Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft…

"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important" Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?

The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#482

Post by nativeit »

maleldil wrote: post #272
whalesalad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sick of all these hacks. I've been a Firefox user for decades but it's time to throw in the towel.

> it's time to throw in the towel And do what? Use a Chromium-based browser, which is infinitely worse?

Forks exist

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#483

Post by notatoad »

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.

Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that.

in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#484

Post by tim333 »

metabagel wrote: post #299
DeusExMachina wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla,…

I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy? Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).

I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.

Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#485

Post by [deleted] »

glenstein wrote: post #292
kburman wrote: post #172

Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about. This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser th…

This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time: (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation. (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some excep…

[deleted]

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#486

Post by nativeit »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #182
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…

On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform. It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature. For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.

I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#487

Post by xp84 »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #390
PaulHoule wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing. Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. Trouble is using a pro…

> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual…

Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).

Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.

So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#488

Post by nativeit »

clueless wrote: post #377
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…

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on.... Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#490

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
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