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Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

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Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#131

Post by koutakun »

ilaksh wrote: post #97
rafram wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s one obvious alternative: fetch("https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions", { ... });

Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service. Give it X months (or years??) and people will realize this is actually a privacy/data autonomy issue. It's just dominated right now by the anti-AI/anti-technology sentiment in the west. That will gradually go away as more people use AI and robotics and realize how wrong they were about it.

>Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service.

Nothing in this proposal claims it has to be a local AI. That just happens to be the implementation by Chrome and Edge (for now at least, I'd imagine Google will eventually start moving this API towards hosted Gemini).

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#132

Post by ilaksh »

nemomarx wrote: post #124
ilaksh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was a good argument to not support an LLM feature, then it would be a reason to not add it to any platform API. And yet, it has been added to numerous platforms already. Different models are just a core aspect of how the technology works. It's like a canvas can have different possible width and height depending on the device or it's orientation. Or the geolocation API giving more or less accuracy depending on…

We have different gps reliability per device because they have actual hardware doing that. Why exactly couldn't models, iq levels, tuning and system prompts be interchangeable in an API for this? Why not let users and devs pick which model to bring or point to one they're paying for, or what have you? I don't see a world where 90 percent of users of this API pick the same underlying model. It doesn't seem like there'…

And I didn't suggest they would necessarily select the same model.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#133

Post by jaffathecake »

domenicd wrote: post #122

I was formerly the design lead / spec editor for this API while I worked at Google. I retired in 2025-09, before it got shipped. The following contains no inside knowledge. I am sympathetic to all of Mozilla's concerns here, even though on balance I believe Chromium's decision to ship was the right one. --- On interoperability, I agree that this is a tough case. But I am more optimistic than Mozilla that developers w…

Thank you for posting this.

On interoperability, time will tell I guess. I've only been working on Firefox for a few months, but general interop issues are way worse than I realised when we worked together at Chrome. Firefox frequently gets bug reports for not behaving like Chrome, even when Firefox is complying with the spec, and Chrome is not. We end up having to just behave like Chrome.

On developer signals… I'm sure there's better evidence of positive sentiment than Chrome provided, but there's a lot of negative sentiment too. I think it would be fair to call the developer signal "mixed", or maybe even "polarised".

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#134

Post by codedokode »

I am against this.

1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it.

2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for many users they would slow down their system significantly, and given current RAM prices, upgrades are very expensive. If the website relies on local model, it would work slow on cheap devices.

3) The API seems to be tailored for specific LLM like OpenAI.

4) This can be used to push competitors who do not have an AI model from the browser market - the sites would break because they will be made with expectation of having Google Gemini model and would not work with other models. For example, the sites would break in national browsers not having an AI model. There should be no "first-class" and "second-class" browsers.

The explainer claims that this would allow the user to process the data locally without sending it anywhere. But why does Google Gemini local model have "Prohobited Use Policy" then? Why should they bother about prompts and responses they never learn about?

While offline LLM access seems like a good idea, the website could use WebGPU for this without building LLM into the browser (or they could improve WebGPU for better handling ML models). Or everyone should use the same, open source, LLM.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#135

Post by ilaksh »

koutakun wrote: post #131
ilaksh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service. Give it X months (or years??) and people will realize this is actually a privacy/data autonomy issue. It's just dominated right now by the anti-AI/anti-technology sentiment in the west. That will gradually go away as more people use AI and robotics and realize how wrong they were about it.

>Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service. Nothing in this proposal claims it has to be a local AI. That just happens to be the implementation by Chrome and Edge (for now at least, I'd imagine Google will eventually start moving this API towards hosted Gemini).

That's an important aspect of this that should really be part of the discussion on GitHub. But I've been told I'm not qualified to interject so I am not going to bother.

I will use WebLLM if I want something like this (with local AI guaranteed).

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#136

Post by jaffathecake »

ilaksh wrote: post #91
OuterVale wrote: post #12

Extremely glad to see Mozilla taking a stance here.

Archibald is anti-AI. 70+% of his public statements have demonstrated that. He is more or less aligned with the current most common sentiment in the west which is largely publicly against AI. But realistically it's just slow adaptation, network effects, etc. To give an example, before the MLB rolled out the Automated Ball Strike system this year, last year maybe 65+% of the sentiment in discussions about it was negat…

It's fun that I get to be called both "anti-AI" and an "AI shill" by people on the internet depending on the day of the week.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#137

Post by codedokode »

Joe_Cool wrote: post #83
hmokiguess wrote: post #72

The nice thing about open protocols is that we don't have to endorse or use one implementation over another, yet, somehow, the browser monopoly continues to be a standing dilemma. There are nice projects, like ungoogled chromium, tor, and many more, but I find the biggest issue is that there isn't a voice out there for the average person and a project that connects with the masses. I think another issue is that a lot…

It's somehow even worse when you compile your own browser. Want Spotify or Netflix? You need Widevine with attestation. Go pay Google. Your Browser Agent string isn't Chrome or Firefox? Enjoy endless Cloudflare captchas or just a 403 error.

Yes, how sovereign national browsers (not depending on US companies and not sending data to US) can be be developed in this situation?

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#138

Post by jaffathecake »

economistbob wrote: post #105

That discussion has a quote about querying the LLM for version information. If the models hallucinate/make up court citations, work and facts, what makes them believe that the model provided a genuine version number as opposed to an generatively constructed string?

Yes! It might lie or hallucinate. But also, all browsers claim to be "Mozilla/5.0" in their user agent string. It's a very similar problem.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#139

Post by rerdavies »

thrance wrote: post #13
shevy-java wrote: post #2

> This will result in Mozilla and Apple having to licence Google's model, or ship a model that's quirks-compatible with the Google model in order to be interoperable. It may also become difficult for Chrome to update its own model for the same reasons. Google is again doing Evil. I am very annoyed that Google kind of de-facto controls the www (through chrome, let's be honest here). We really need to change this. I do…

Lina Khan's FTC sought to break Google into multiple companies, leaving Chrome alone. Alas, Google escaped unscathed.

Fortunately, they chickened out when they realized that forcing Google to divest Chrome would result in Chrome being owned by Perplexity (an Indian AI company). Or perhaps somebody even worse, like Elon Musk.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#140

Post by 827a »

The more I think about it, the more I think I align with Google's API design on this one.

The tight coupling between prompts and models is a real concern. I deal with that every day. However: if your solution to that is to support an API that enables tighter coupling between the model the user's browser has and the prompt that gets evaluated, you will inevitably and quickly enter the domain of "You need to use Chrome to use this site (because our prompts were only tested on Gemini)" or even worse "We don't recognize the AI model you're using (because the website was written in 2026 and the current year is 2030 and they never updated it)".

This is related to the terms of use concerns the Mozilla engineer has later; real concerns. But, if we want browsers to exist that don't require users to opt-in to the terms of use of a specific AI model (e.g. using a nice open source model), its beneficial to these browsers that they can't fingerprint for the Big Models.

Of course many sites will just do an isChrome()-like call anyway. Nothing to be done about that. But yeah I am generally non-supportive of changes that introduce more ways to fingerprint browsers. The upside of keeping the model anonymous outweighs the slight downside of (rarely) encountering weird prompt evaluation output because of a small difference in behavior between Gemini and, idk, Qwen.

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