I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…
On the fingerprinting concerns: I have to imagine there will be an option in Chrome (certainly in Firefox) to "never download an LLM, turn off all LLM functionality". I suppose I can see an angle where a website could issue a small LLM request to try and fingerprint the model itself, which is another fingerprinting parameter. But as long as it can be turned off I don't see why this is a problem. There's a broader cla…
Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
231–240 of 248 posts
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure actual humans work at Google. These actual humans are actively choosing to continue doing a job that makes the web worse. I don't see how "but they're human!" means automatic forgiveness of their actions.
> I don't see how "but they're human!" means automatic forgiveness of their actions. it doesnt, if the actions are bad. but if your blind hatred makes you think that google will not "EVER" produce something of value to the web or humanity, then you are just being obtuse. i have already provided one example of something good that is directly attributable to google. there are several more examples, i am sure.
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#233I was formerly the design lead / spec editor for this API while I worked at Google. I retired in 2025-09, before it got shipped. The following contains no inside knowledge. I am sympathetic to all of Mozilla's concerns here, even though on balance I believe Chromium's decision to ship was the right one. --- On interoperability, I agree that this is a tough case. But I am more optimistic than Mozilla that developers w…
I think this is an oddly optimistic outlook from someone who until recently worked at Google. A company that has shipped, and probably still ships, lots of sites and versions of sites gated behind "does your user agent say it is Chrome".
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the typical "cart before the horse" kind of corporate tech talk. It's pretty standard if Silicon Valley wants to sell shit that nobody actually wants; they just assume that people will want it, regardless whether or not they actually want it. Most of the tech press is too obsessed with retaining their "access" to actually be critical of this sort of thing, and most of the regular press doesn't care enough to act…
I think the resentment for Copilot is pretty much universal. People like AI, when it’s not forced upon them. A lot of these products feel unguided by an “everything must become AI” FOMO movement, rather than actual thoughtful integrations.
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's exhausting having such reflexive thoughtless ragging anytime Chrome is mentioned. Oh no! Chrome is trying to enhance user agency again! Oh no! Chrome is trying to make the web better for end users! Mozilla's concerns aren't totally bogus, I'm not going to try to laugh them out of the room. But their pearl clutching & belly-aching about "oh no what if not all implementations of ai prompts work exactly the same" f…
It's not pearl clutching to suggest that websites will build around quirks of a specific model and then we'll be stuck with it forever. This is an issue for future Google as much as it is for Mozilla and Apple. We had WebSQL which defactor relied on a specific DB implementation, sqlite, and I suspect it also essentially couldn't be updated because people relied on the quirks of a specific version of sqlite.
But there's no suggestion or idea, no way to specify our way out of this one.
And the idea of providing too much guidance because one model has quirks? That seems so so very so-what. Oh no we over-prompted isn't zero impact. But it usually isn't that cataclysmic. I feel like this is such a 0.001% gripe, and to hold up all agency on the web because of this is unbecoming. Is ridiculous.
I know browsers wanted to get rid of websql but generally I thought the consensus was websql was disliked generally by vendors. It wasn't that they wanted a different websql: they didn't want a websql at all, period. The quirks weren't the problem.
Again though, fucking help! Fine, there are problems. I personally think this is some absurd fucking ridiculous mountains out of mole hills and ya'll are being absurd over this. Absurd. But if this was a discussion where there were interesting future directions to look to, that we could pursue and try to follow up on? Ok! Fine! Have your pound of flesh maybe or maybe it really does pay out! But it is some conservative Fear Uncertainty and Doubt soul rotting evil to obstruct & deny while making qualifications that are utterly unobtainable.
Meanwhile the rest of the software world is going to keep moving. The web is just going to be colossal negatively impacted by this impossible "it must be perfect" impasse created for no reason with no expectations of resolvability, in spite of the base premise of giving users access to their agents being an obvious direct and clear improvement over every other possibility by country miles.
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#236The objections seem clear: tight-coupling of prompts to models, and model neutrality in the TOU. From https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 : "A personal example: I created a system prompt for creating announcements for a home automation system. The Gemini model I was using initially responded in a very US-American way, which didn't fit the British voice of my speaker. I told the model, via the s…
This API is a neutral party and can be iterated on. These objections are particular objections, to an implementation detail. One that can be swapped out, iterated on, improved on, changed, tailored to the user, by the user working with their user-agent and the LLM choice. One whose failure seems in the realm of personal preference rather than fundamental or harmful or damaging. So what if the English isn't exactly to your liking for the current model? To rest the argument against on such petty matters makes my head reel.
Iterating & improving on the base model & some system prompts allowed in this spec. Rather than using the API to try to cajole this very particular behavior that Jake seems to want everywhere, the user agent could let him set system prompts or pick a more suitable UK trained model, if that's really so important to them. The user agent is the proper channel for the agency Jake is seeking here. Theres nothing preventing the user & their user agent from negotiating what model they use. I don't think we all should be held hostage to naysaying by people who decide that the ability to have "the model needs to talk like a pirate, but this model didn't do that well" decision making. That's circumstantial nonsense, blocking the user agent from being able to work with the user to extend user agency, over such a narrow concern, that must be free to iterate anyhow!!
This API is the best basis we have to allow this negotiation to happen, out of band, outside the scope of the web API offered here, by agents. It's not up to the page to define this in the first place. It's the browser, the user agent that (as always has been the case on the web) builds user agency at its offered level of customizability & complexity. Maybe not every browser offers a "speak like a pirate". That lack is not a ding on the web prompt API!
The objections as stated have no resolution. This is a forever block for all time that is aggreived because not every model is going to behave exactly predictably perfectly. And there's no possible way out of this condundrum. The grievances of this submission are that sites will try to work around this, but the greivance here is built around the assumption that all agency has to lie with the site, that it's the site's obligation to fix US vs British English, that it's the site's need to tailor the agent.
That's not feasible not possible not sensible ever. The user agent is the mediating agent between the site and the user and the agent. That is going to be a complex evolving and dynamic relationship. The "failure" Jake cites here of the site to fully sculpt the experience is unreasonable, is an anti goal. It's up to the user and the browser to shape the agent for them, not each site.
I find these objections to be deeply deeply misguided. But worse, I find them to insist in perfection. There is no direction offered, no improvement suggested. The site can't make agents perfect therefore no one gets agents. That's all this says. It's fucking bullshit and fuck this a lot.
(I love Jake and they have done so much good so so so many times, but this is an impossible situation they are creating while leaving zero space for possibility for maybe and zero leadership for how else we can do what obviously must be done. Alas I think Mozilla at large had become the anti-possible company of web standards, which is a detestable position, one I had hoped might improve, eventually.)
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#237I feel that a LLM that runs locally has its place in a modern browser. The alternative is sending your page contents to a server in the cloud with the associated loss of privacy. Of course issues like fingerprintability and vendor model lockin have to be taken into account. It seems to be too early to carve things in stone, so I agree with Brian Grinstead and the others.
The alternative is that web pages just don't run inference? Why is that something a web page should expect to have a right to? If you want to burn a bunch of GPU heat, spend it on your own servers, not my computer. Either way, if this does happen I definitely hope it gets put behind a brower permission.
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#238The objections seem clear: tight-coupling of prompts to models, and model neutrality in the TOU. From https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 : "A personal example: I created a system prompt for creating announcements for a home automation system. The Gemini model I was using initially responded in a very US-American way, which didn't fit the British voice of my speaker. I told the model, via the s…
This is a joke of an objection. This API is a neutral party and can be iterated on. These objections are particular objections, to an implementation detail. One that can be swapped out, iterated on, improved on, changed, tailored to the user, by the user working with their user-agent and the LLM choice. One whose failure seems in the realm of personal preference rather than fundamental or harmful or damaging. So what…
This isn't how it works. As the developer, you use the system prompt to set a particular personality for the chat bot. Eg, when you use an LLM in VSCode, it comes with a system prompt to make it an effective code assistant.
Now, in VSCode, you can select a different model, which is maybe where your misconception comes from. But when you select a different model, it will also use a different system prompt, designed to achieve the same personality, but tailored for that particular model.
Once you figure out why they do that, you'll understand why your position here doesn't make sense.
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, most of the young people I know fall somewhere between those two sides of the spectrum. I know some actual luddite-tier AI haters that believe it's ontologically evil, and another majoring in Data Science that went to the most recent career fair and told a recruiter "AI will replace you" (I uh don't think he's getting that internship) And of course many, many, others that fall between the two extremes…
I'm a member of a political action committee, where I was brought in as an expert in professional media applications of AI. I've got extensive experience using AI tools in the production of well known entertainment properties (think VFX for film and animation.) Anyway, within the political action committee where is a diverse mixture of people, with about 1/5th of them under age 30. The entire under age 30 set are so…
Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
#240^ didnt realize who posted the opposition - this is Jake Archibald, a longtime googler on the Chrome team, now joining Mozilla and posting opposition to the Chrome API. no wonder the criticism is so well argued. most be a relief to not have to toe the party line on this one.
Aww thanks! To be fair I didn't toe the party line when I was at Google (imo). Although, that caused me increasing amount of grief internally, until I left. From what I hear, things have gotten exponentially worse in that regard for folks still on the team.
Hearing about positive personnel shift like this now gives me a bunch more optimism on this. I really hope I can go back to the days of unambiguously being in support of Mozilla and their many awesome efforts, without always having to be a bit dubious about their next (mis)step.