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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

#461

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

kakuri wrote: post #302
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 a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.

I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#462

Post by charcircuit »

benrutter wrote: post #144
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.

Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.

>that mostly just take out tracking and AI features

Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#463

Post by im3w1l »

I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs at all).

I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#464

Post by everfree »

vaadu wrote: post #370

I want a browser to prioritize speed, standards, stability and security. All other features should come via add-ons. Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.

What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#465

Post by kelvinjps10 »

vidarh wrote: post #76
andy99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options.

Just to push their annoying google assistant

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#466

Post by mikkupikku »

Speak for yourself, I do want to see Mozilla experimenting with new features and functionality opened up by new technology. Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be trying new things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It's new technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla should be on the forefront of figuring it out.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#467

Post by dpark »

taeric wrote: post #433
jdeibele wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's

The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.

Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it.

Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#468

Post by devilbunny »

taeric wrote: post #433
jdeibele wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's

The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.

Google Wave... what an amazing piece of work just thrown in the trash.

I never used any of its collaboration features, just looked at them. I did use it as a friendly-for-non-geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST. And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was cheap and light and worked).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#469

Post by lone-cloud »

I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#470

Post by marssaxman »

taeric wrote: post #433
jdeibele wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's

The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.

Google Plus launched between the time I interviewed at Google and the time I started work there, and that really took the shine off the whole thing.
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