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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

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Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#11

Post by peri-cl »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #8
peri-cl wrote: post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

I can't fathom how they'd consider "Private" something that uploads all the sensitive information in readable form to a third party service. In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.

It's more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google servers, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the browser,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ("Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud (addons.mozilla.org)")

And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy:

> "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private."

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#12

Post by HelloUsername »

Related, but hardly activity:

"Firefox Smart Window" 21.apr.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852016

"Firefox Smart Window" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345179

"Firefox and Exa Partnership" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346066

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#13

Post by ulimn »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #7

Didn’t OpenAI tried to build even a new AI browser and failed? I honestly don’t need AI in my browser and would not let an agent to access my login credentials/cookies/saved payment methods for various sites.

It's pretty nice for tedious tasks. I tried to have it look through job listings based on my criteria. It burned through my 5h Claude quota, but what I got was pretty impressive.

I agree on the privacy concerns but this could be useful with a local model, I think.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#16

Post by padenot »

peri-cl wrote: post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#17

Post by eis »

Mozilla lost the tech race and with it a lot of users. Firing a lot of their talented developers didn't help. Now Mozilla is giving up the only reason why they kept a core audience of privacy focused users by sending our browsing data to third party servers for inference just at the time when small local models are getting good enough for many/most use cases like summarization or translation. Chrome provides an API for local LLMs. Apple is trying to run as much interference locally as possible. Mozilla is worse than that. Claiming private browsing while sending data to third parties.

I don't care what their data retention policies are, I don't want my data to be sent to others full stop.

Private means it's mine, it's under my control. Handing it to third parties is not private.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#18

Post by julenx »

peri-cl wrote: post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first.

  > The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server.
  > 
  > Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The LLM receives the request from Mozilla, not directly from you, and sees a Mozilla IP address rather than your own. The request includes only the information needed to generate a response or perform the requested action.
Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification:

  > When you submit a query in the Smart Bar, the assistant uses a local (on-device) intent classification model to determine whether the query is best addressed by a chat or a search.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#19

Post by HelloUsername »

padenot wrote: post #16
peri-cl wrote: post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.

The "Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite" also points incorrectly (?) to https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
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