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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#331

Post by altcognito »

riskable wrote: post #146
altcognito wrote: post #75

People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly. I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around. Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.

> People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly. Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.

Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in expanding the scope without saying as much.

Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...

The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)

So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#332

Post by submeta »

I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.

Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.

Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.

And now Firefox.

Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#333

Post by tempest_ »

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…

They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.

Well 30 years later we are back where we started.

Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.

Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#334

Post by Kiro »

bildung wrote: post #143
boplicity wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.

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.

Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but would love to be proven wrong.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#335

Post by simianparrot »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #216
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…

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla,…

Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#336

Post by etempleton »

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.

Step 1. Integrate AI

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#337

Post by isodev »

jajuuka wrote: post #285
isodev wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.

Another example of "nobody I know" and not nobody.

[flagged]

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#338

Post by usefulcat »

amelius wrote: post #301
cornholio wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the t…

> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.

Maybe in the long term, but not necessarily in the short term.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#339

Post by Workaccount2 »

Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself.

Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.

They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.

Signed, a 20 year user.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#340

Post by FelipeCortez »

ninalanyon wrote: post #329
vidarh wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar. But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.

I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.

You can open Chrome with a remote debugging port enabled and send commands to it using the Devtools Protocol. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
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