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

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

manualdousuario.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 782 posts

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#201

Post by ryandrake »

tcoff91 wrote: post #164
railka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better…

It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.

And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#203

Post by dymk »

tcoff91 wrote: post #164
railka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better…

It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.

They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#204

Post by mabedan »

azinman2 wrote: post #101
mabedan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.

What are you constantly summarizing?

Articles. Some articles I fully read, some others I just read the headline, and some others I want to spend 2 minutes reading the summary to know whether I want to read the full thing.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#205

Post by _verandaguy »

vt240 wrote: post #174
_verandaguy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.

I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.

You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.

Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.

It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#206

Post by thsbrown »

railka wrote: post #153
transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better…

I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.

The pessimism can get old.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#207

Post by nunez »

Adrig wrote: post #12
everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.

Loads of people are Google's AI Summaries; it's the first result, so, hard to miss.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#208

Post by vidarh »

novemp wrote: post #169
vidarh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you give an example? Recipe pages full of fluff. Review pages full of fluff. Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion. > And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation? You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trus…

Most recipe blogs have a "skip to recipe" button because they know you don't care.

Enough don't.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#209

Post by cratermoon »

nerdjon wrote: post #91
cratermoon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.

I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said.. But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best. They are purposefully making it harder and harder…

For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean, and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV. I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#210

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

satvikpendem wrote: post #155
bildung wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still. On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.

There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.

I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis.

For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others.

When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word.

Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.

Post reply on HN