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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

mistral.ai

41–50 of 211 posts

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfox also works well!

I remember using Waterfox in the past, I think because they were keeping an old UI. Is that the draw over Librewolf?

For me the draw is that Waterfox has partnerships in order to provide funding so if/when Mozilla truly loses the thread (which some may argue they have) WF can keep going on its own, whereas the Librewolf devs have stated that if push comes to shove they can't maintain an entire browser themselves.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#43
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…

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference,

How small is this 'small model' inference?

Browsers especially are expected to operate on a very wide number of devices. It makes perfect sense to me to start off with a cloud driven approach and later allow people to configure it to run locally if they have the hardware to do so. Anyone with the hardware to do so is already signaling that they'd have the technical interest to make that change while having the default 'works for everyone' mode be one that doesn't require a powerful local device.

I say this as someone using a 6 year old computer and only upgraded to 8GB of ram when the latest WoW expansion was released.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#44
post #18
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…

Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#46
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except ... this is not local. It's a remote service. Here is something that is: docker run ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.3 docker run mcr.microsoft.com/playwright/mcp:latest Configure them. Open-webui needs a model (a local qwen3.8 does amazing), and you need to link them up. Playwright will just do stuff.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.

Oohohohohoohohohoho Merry Christmas!!!

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#47
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 am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand.

But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser.

You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus).

It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.

I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#48
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…

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference

Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#49
Not sure if it's a locally run model or in the cloud. If it's the former they don't explain the size on disk and more importantly on memory. I know that google is using local models on the pixel phones, so it's doable. If it's the later, the "Mozilla don't keep the data" is hypocritical and I'm perplexed by the cost associated.

In any case as a french, I prefer my personnal data be exploited by a french company :D

Edit: after reading the comments, it is not a local AI so "Mozilla don't keeep the data and don't train on them" is really hypocritical if they cannot confirm that it's the same on mistral side. And there is still the question of the cost.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#50
post #36

I cannot in a million years imagine using these features. Just be more organised.

I understand why they built this. They probably should and this is probably the right way to do it.

And also yes, I’ve tried Dia and OpenAI’s thing and I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do with the feature.

And then it dawns on me what I really want is a modernized bookmarks system…

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