I am out of the loop, but what AI features does Firefox offer these days?
Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
311–320 of 554 posts
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#312I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works.…
Why does the browser itself need AI features ?
You can still easily visit chagpt via web if Gemini or whatever
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this will be a non-starter in 2 years. Why though? Seriously.
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated? Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it? Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."
I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.
Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own. More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now . Again, I don't like it, but that's the reality…
+ Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini. It has already become the de facto standard for learning. AI in browsers is inevitable.
?????
Why does the existance of an AI chat box website mean a browser must do more than take you to that website?
The forceful inclusion of LLMs in places that have no value are simultaneously ubiquitous and obnoxious.
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#315what i hate most about this (and the discussion happening in the comments), is that nobody is even defining "AI". "artificial intelligence" is not a technical term. what is mozzila doing exactly? what does it mean to put AI in the browser?
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this". Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifi…
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want. but meanwhile, in the real world [0]: > In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search. if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be…
not to mention the high resource-usage of a local LLM that most PCs wouldn't be able to handle, or would just drain a laptop's battery.
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own. More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now . Again, I don't like it, but that's the reality…
+ Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini. It has already become the de facto standard for learning. AI in browsers is inevitable.
"Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini"
Yes.
"It has already become the de facto standard for learning."
Maybe.
"AI in browsers is inevitable."
Why. How does that follow. It seems like ChatGPT and Gemini are already working fine, what does the integration add?
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#318what i hate most about this (and the discussion happening in the comments), is that nobody is even defining "AI". "artificial intelligence" is not a technical term. what is mozzila doing exactly? what does it mean to put AI in the browser?
There is kind of software that is created using techniques very different from the techniques used to create the vast majority of socioeconomically-important software until about 4 years ago. We need a name for this thing that definitely exists in reality and definitely differs from software created the traditional way. That name is AI. We're probably going to keep on calling it that even if lots of people protest that having "intelligence" in the name is misleading or erroneous.
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#319I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works.…
Fully disagree. I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one. Why do I need them in my browser, and why does my browser need to focus on something that, several years into the hype wave, I still *do not use at all*? And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I'd be elated if Firefox solely focused on "the pre-AI era", as you put it, and many other power users would, too. And I somehow doubt my non-techie family cares - if anything, they're tired of seeing the stupid sparkle icons crammed down their throats at every single corner of the world now.
Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
#320I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works.…
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards. If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome. That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don…
> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.
Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.
Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).
Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?