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

Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

davidrevoy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#21

Post by skydhash »

matusp wrote: post #17
xnx wrote: post #7

There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla, but it's crazy to be against them for AI. A browser is literally a user agent . What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

The AI hate is unreasonably strong right now. People are acting like adding one feature they don't like or need to a browser is a borderline critical offense because it is an AI feature. I find it shocking how quickly the public in the US/EU developed this sort of hate towards one of the most interesting technology of the last decades.

Let's say you went to a library to find a book for a thesis. But instead the librarian instead on spinning tales and waste your time. It's fun when in a comedy show, but not so fun when you want to get something done. LLM technology is nice, but not everyone wants an hallucination machine, especially on their own computer. It would be another matter if Mozilla, Google, or Microsoft were offering free laptops.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#22

Post by throwaway613745 »

xnx wrote: post #7

There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla, but it's crazy to be against them for AI. A browser is literally a user agent . What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

A browser user agent is a string of text that a web browser sends to a web server to identify itself and provide information about the browser's capabilities, such as its type, version, and the operating system it runs on.

This has nothing to do with what an AI “agent” is.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#23

Post by _ache_ »

xnx wrote: post #7

There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla, but it's crazy to be against them for AI. A browser is literally a user agent . What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

The problem with AI is privacy.

Firefox should be the browser that respects you privacy (the only one...). Integrating AI undermining the efforts of making it the privacy oriented browser.

For now the AI is forced and ridiculously complicated to disable (with new options in about:config poping in each new version). The promise to have an "disable all IA features" is still a promise.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#24

Post by avian »

nonsenseinc wrote: post #4

The cute fox could have been a cute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda , which the "Firefox" is referencing afaik.

Is it though? To me the animal on logos used by Firefox [1] always looked more similar to a red fox [2] than a red panda. Note pointy nose with the bottom colored white. Even the latest logo that shows more of the side of the face lacks the kind of patterns distinctive of the red panda. The -fire part of the name seemed to be represented by the flaming tail, not the animal itself.

[1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Firefox-L...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fox

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#25

Post by nonsenseinc »

avian wrote: post #24
nonsenseinc wrote: post #4

The cute fox could have been a cute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda , which the "Firefox" is referencing afaik.

Is it though? To me the animal on logos used by Firefox [1] always looked more similar to a red fox [2] than a red panda. Note pointy nose with the bottom colored white. Even the latest logo that shows more of the side of the face lacks the kind of patterns distinctive of the red panda. The -fire part of the name seemed to be represented by the flaming tail, not the animal itself. [1] https://logos-world.net/wp-conte…

Yes, especially the first Firefox logo has a distinct snout. I have no primary source to quote, but there are plenty claims, referencing each other, that the name stems from the nickname of the red panda. I was wondering if there is any official statement about the name. But it seems most common to think of a (speedy?) fox with a flaming tail. How to derive a dog's burning relative from a phoenix seems to remain uncertain.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#27

Post by nephihaha »

avian wrote: post #24
nonsenseinc wrote: post #4

The cute fox could have been a cute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda , which the "Firefox" is referencing afaik.

Is it though? To me the animal on logos used by Firefox [1] always looked more similar to a red fox [2] than a red panda. Note pointy nose with the bottom colored white. Even the latest logo that shows more of the side of the face lacks the kind of patterns distinctive of the red panda. The -fire part of the name seemed to be represented by the flaming tail, not the animal itself. [1] https://logos-world.net/wp-conte…

Well, red pandas are more likely to live up trees than foxes are.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#28

Post by yorwba »

baud147258 wrote: post #8

why did you link that instead of the original source ( https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/misc__2025-12-18_Shhh... ) , since it's already linked in the page?

David Revoy is the artist who made the painting, this is his blog. The "source" link is to be understood in the sense of open source. Unlike most artists, he shares the raw editor files he worked on, not just the final image. So you can learn something about his creative process if you want to.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#29

Post by StellarScience »

_ache_ wrote: post #23
xnx wrote: post #7

There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla, but it's crazy to be against them for AI. A browser is literally a user agent . What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

The problem with AI is privacy. Firefox should be the browser that respects you privacy (the only one...). Integrating AI undermining the efforts of making it the privacy oriented browser. For now the AI is forced and ridiculously complicated to disable (with new options in about:config poping in each new version). The promise to have an "disable all IA features" is still a promise.

Years ago our company consolidated on Firefox because we could rely on it to not send our information to remote servers. At that time other browsers made it hard to disable telemetry. Firefox was then the only browser that could forward Kerberos tickets to remote servers, for highly secure two-factor authentication and single-sign on.

I'm personnally sad that now we have to consider banning Firefox for company use, because it's hard to verify that we've disabled every AI "feature" that might funnel our data to remote servers.

Re: Mozilla right now (Digital Painting)

#30

Post by 0manrho »

nine_k wrote: post #19
xnx wrote: post #7

There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla, but it's crazy to be against them for AI. A browser is literally a user agent . What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

The problem is that the users seem not to ask for it. To the contrary, they seek ways to opt out. I don't want the AI to be front and center in my browser. I do want the AI, if present, be local, and be distributed among tools: a better reading mode, fuzzy search on the page that searches by meaning, recognizing text on images (and also make it searchable and selectable), creature comforts like that. If I need to cha…

We shouldn't have to opt out in the first place.

It should be opt-in by default.

Why: Because AI is constantly and very frequently changing and evolving with lots of security concerns given how much scope/context/permissions it's typically granted. By having it enabled by default means that you have zero expectations that whatever settings/preferences/configs you changed in order to "opt-out" may no longer be respected/preserved/effective.

This is a major problem before we ever get to "what are the specific problems" regarding AI.

Post reply on HN