Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 213 posts

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#111

Post by encom »

Yoric wrote: post #97
drnick1 wrote: post #38

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made. Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for…

It's a really hard line to walk. If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable. On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of…

Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You can't have both.

And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#112

Post by encom »

freedomben wrote: post #44
drnick1 wrote: post #38

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made. Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for…

I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further l…

>only ever be used by the extremely small niche[...]

Isn't that pretty much the current situation?

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#113

Post by jcranmer »

devsda wrote: post #75
dralley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using…

End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers. I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.

> I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative.

They did! At least three different versions of it!

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#114

Post by mkroman »

I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla?

All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.

There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.

Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.

Off the top of my head, they could instead:

1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio

2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#115

Post by encom »

Yoric wrote: post #99
nusl wrote: post #12

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.

At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.

If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#116

Post by luisgvv »

TomMasz wrote: post #103

As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.

Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#117

Post by bigbadfeline »

whinvik wrote: post #20

I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing. However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.

I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?"

> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.

As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?

The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.

On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#118

Post by b1085436 »

I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.

Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#119

Post by sunaookami »

encom wrote: post #115
Yoric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned. At least that's how it looked from this side. I…

In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more angry with having double standards regarding their shitty add-on review system.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#120

Post by oever »

steveklabnik wrote: post #107
Yoric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…

I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.

I'm still happy with mozilla. Keep it up!
Post reply on HN