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Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

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Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#361

Post by runarberg »

Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #356
klardotsh wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Firefo…

AI tools are here to stay. They will start to creep into everything, everywhere, all the time. Either you recognize the moment at which it becomes a significant disadvantage not to use them (I agree that moment is not now), or get left behind.

AI crap has already been crammed into everything for months now, and nobody like it nor wants it. There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#362

Post by epgui »

echelon wrote: post #360
tliltocatl wrote: post #355

I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Ther…

> people screaming "but AI is the future" I witnes far more people screaming against AI. The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now. Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments. I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal…

> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI

I wonder what that might mean!

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#363

Post by tliltocatl »

echelon wrote: post #360
tliltocatl wrote: post #355

I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Ther…

> people screaming "but AI is the future" I witnes far more people screaming against AI. The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now. Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments. I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal…

If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#364

Post by mrweasel »

tliltocatl wrote: post #355

I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Ther…

It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox.

Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#365

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

rk06 wrote: post #336
lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.

to pump adoption number. it is well known that adoption rate is much higher when people are forced to opt-in be default. because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine

Mozilla shouldn't need to worry about adoption numbers though.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#366

Post by rhdunn »

wkat4242 wrote: post #201
MisterTea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this will be a non-starter in 2 years. Why though? Seriously.

Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves. Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because…

We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.

I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.

Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.

On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#367

Post by ehnto »

echelon wrote: post #360
tliltocatl wrote: post #355

I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. Ther…

> people screaming "but AI is the future" I witnes far more people screaming against AI. The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now. Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments. I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal…

There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#368

Post by bannana2033 »

Average Joe or Joan will install some crap AI assisted browser if some idiot in Tiktok or FB says follow me and I will DM you a special link to get baby-clothes for -10% discount. Hope your family is not that. My spouse despite reading HN etc thinks that anyway privacy is lost - so why notget at least that 10% discount.

Another problem for Mozilla:

- If they don't pivot to AI people will leave it. Yes, some hardcore RMS fans will use some clone of Firefox - all others will not

- If they adopt modern AI people scream

- Same happened when Mozilla accepted DRM (for Netflix etc). Many tech writers, commentators were against that. But if Firefox did not adopt it then all those tech writers would have used Chrome to see Netflix. No one of these commentators say they will boycott Netflix.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#369

Post by protocolture »

charcircuit wrote: post #341
protocolture wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser. Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI? >I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful. I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for…

The evidence is the billions of people who copy text to and from ChatGPT to other web pages.

But not just other web pages, other apps too. So again, why a browser. Why ask firefoxs pop out expansion panel instead of a right click context menu in word, or a chat interface in copilots phat app or a website chat interface or the precious space under a google search or any of the other 10000 places people are inserting this shit.

And a copy paste task isnt necessarily going to be aided by a pop out sidebar running a local LLM chewing up already precious RAM. There's no guarantee its going to integrate correctly with the users chosen LLM provider.

Like we are looking at having LLM's inserted into almost every customer facing application. At some point, they will want a subscription for each of them or they are all going to need local resources. They are all going to have to be interoperable and run off the same account. Or you are going to have to have something that just works with the whole stack.

It doesn't make a lick of sense to try and preempt that situation, with mainline features pushed to all customers.

Googles approach, having a separate AI enabled browser makes the most sense. If it takes off its because of affirmative user consent and they can merge it into chrome. If it doesn't work they can silently discontinue it like so many other things.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#370

Post by protocolture »

darkwater wrote: post #351
rockskon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: ??????? You people need to be forced to use your product in the exact form your product is presented to end users. With the exact frequency it's presented to end users. In all the wrong places as it is presented to end users. Maybe then you'll understand why shoving AI in every conceivable crevice is incredibly obnoxious and distracting and, most importantly, not useful .

Shoving an AI agent in every website is distracting and not that useful. Shoving an AI agent in every app is distracting as well. Having one global AI agent per operating system or browser (where most of the digital life happens, in the case of desktop browsers), for the people that want to have an AI agent, it's probably going to be useful, if well implemented.

OS might make sense, but the browser level is a weird middle space for it.
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