Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

well_ackshually wrote: post #171

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT. Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence…

Post by negura » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 12:29 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #120

mixcocam wrote: post #26

Would be very cool if you could type a long query and the model would just build an advanced google search query using what you typed. You could even ship a tiny model in the browser itself that does that. Something like: "blog posts which talk about using sending emails to yourself as a notes taking mechanism". The output could look like: "note taking" OR "notes" ("emailing yourself" OR "email to myself" OR "email y…

There's no such thing as an advanced google search query anymore. The second will give you worse results than the first (without quotes.)

Post by nickthegreek » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

fn-mote wrote: post #22

karussell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?) I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.

> Nowhere in the news they say it is offline Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”. How else could the information be kept private? I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.

Post by thayne » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

peri-cl wrote: post #101

walrus01 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, it depends on the task, doesn't it? "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" doesn't need a 119 billion parameter frontier model; it's a RAG problem for the 0.6 B embedding models. That's an example Mozilla offers. Presumably to explain to their users why it's essential they hand over their last week's browsing history for this convenience (but it isn't! Hardly for…

Post by calgoo » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 6:18 AM UTC

petra wrote: post #148

peri-cl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on the task, doesn't it? "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" doesn't need a 119 billion parameter frontier model; it's a RAG problem for the 0.6 B embedding models. That's an example Mozilla offers. Presumably to explain to their users why it's essential they hand over their last week's browsing history for this convenience (but it isn't! Hardly for…

Let's say the goal is doing something for work, so accuracy is important, and you prefer for it to be a nice reading experience, like a good translation. As long as cloud model are somewhat better in these things, it's good that users would have the option to use cloud models.