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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

#341

Post by AlecSchueler »

isodev wrote: post #330
amelius wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> according to free market theory Not once in the history of tech “the free market” has succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots of money from doing something they want.

I'm actually leaning towards the above comment being satire, it's hard to believe anyone on HN could believe in a free market in 2025.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#342

Post by dbg31415 »

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 want Mozilla Observatory.

They did a good job with that.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#343

Post by PanoptesYC »

anuramat wrote: post #276

counterpoint: I want AI in firefox there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?

Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default.

I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#344

Post by georgeecollins »

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.

For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page.

The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#345

Post by roncesvalles »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #110

I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't…

You didn't even read 6 sentences into TFA. 52/52 of the closed-beta testers of this feature want it removed.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#346

Post by LtWorf »

ortusdux wrote: post #130
vidarh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.

My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.

On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone.

I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#347

Post by rpgbr »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #339

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.

I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#348

Post by LtWorf »

Sophira wrote: post #192
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.

To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio , not text, and it can run on your mobile phone. It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM. [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md

Whisper is a great random word generator when you use it on italian!

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#350

Post by rpgbr »

noir_lord wrote: post #170
_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.

browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false browser.ml.chat.menu set to false browser.ml.chat.page set to false browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false browser.ml.enable set to false browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabl…

At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused, AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings, like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting protection that many sites don't play nice with.
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