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

221–230 of 782 posts

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#221

Post by lotsofpulp »

vidarh wrote: post #137
lotsofpulp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

> 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…

I guess I never come across that situation because I just don’t engage with sources that fluff. That is a good example, but presumably, there should be no errors there because it’s just stripping away unnecessary stuff? Although, you would have to trust the LLM doesn’t get rid of or change a key step in the process, which I still don’t feel comfortable trusting.

I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict its result to a single web page.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#222

Post by flenserboy »

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.

Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.

It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#223

Post by dawnerd »

andy99 wrote: post #70
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.

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to…

I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#224

Post by garciansmith »

jasonlotito wrote: post #156
rwmj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know its summaries are correct?

It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add something to this discussion. How do I know what I'd be reading is correct? To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original ar…

You can make a better decision if you have the context of the actual thing you are reading, both in terms of how it's presented (the non-textual aspects of a webpage for instance) and the language used. You can get a sense of who the intended audience might be, what their biases might be, how accurate this might be, etc. By using a summarizing tool all that is lost, you give up using your own faculties to understand and judge, and instead you put your trust in a third party which uses its own language, has its own biases, etc.

Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there become slop, does any of this matter?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#225

Post by CjHuber »

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 don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#226

Post by tjpnz »

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.

That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#227

Post by tjpnz »

andy99 wrote: post #70
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.

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to…

"X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#228

Post by rollcat »

probably_wrong wrote: post #54
aquova wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus,…

> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a mar…

> Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.

I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold?

Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#229

Post by wpm »

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.

Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#230

Post by 999900000999 »

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.

It's magic when it's optional.

I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.

But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.

From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears.

As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.

Post reply on HN