Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

Post by nosioptar » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #47

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 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 ex…

Post by nosioptar » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

nhinck3 wrote: post #73

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…

Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?

Post by asdfsa32 » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

wky wrote: post #74

mossTechnician wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentence is eye-opening: > Smart Window infers information about you based on your interactions with the assistant and your Firefox browsing activity, including websites you have visited. This may include activity outside of Smart Window (such as in classic windows)... Privacy-minded users who want to try this feature would need to create a totally separate browser profile to avoid data leaks.

You can control this in the settings: - Learn from chats in Smart Window - Learn from browsing in Classic and Smart Windows

Post by well_ackshually » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

Iolaum wrote: post #44

julenx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by nosioptar » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

pferde wrote: post #92

Neat, how can I turn it off?