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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

#471

Post by darepublic »

tracker1 wrote: post #245
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…

Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly. I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anythi…

Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you cannot opt out of them.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#472

Post by mmaunder »

"We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow."

You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#473

Post by pessimizer »

benatkin wrote: post #258
DeusExMachina wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid. I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.

Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.)

I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.

But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#474

Post by autoexec »

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.

One of the problems with that idea is that sometimes it will be far more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they want and because eventually making the most amount of money possible becomes the only thing that matters to a company, what users want gets ignored and users are forced to settle for whats available.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#475

Post by nativeit »

orbital-decay wrote: post #373
isodev wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator. Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.

Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural co…

Maybe talk to the recently resigned Japanese translation team leader about how good AI translations are.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#476

Post by timeinput »

stingraycharles wrote: post #404
moffkalast wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking, have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly. Currently they've at least got one of the three.

doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”? what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.

If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know enough to put any weight behind that statement.

It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.

I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#477

Post by janalsncm »

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 an encoder decoder transformer. The input is audio spectrograms, the output is text tokens. It is an improvement over old school transcription methods because it’s trained on audio transcripts, so it makes contextually plausible predictions.

Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it’s indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more important question is how these things are used in the UX. Decoders don’t have to be annoying, that is a product choice.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#478

Post by rkomorn »

dpark wrote: post #467
taeric wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

I don't see Google Plus as hubris. I just think they saw a threat in Facebook and felt they had to try and build a competing product (and happened to have the time/money to invest).

Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've been hubris.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#479

Post by nativeit »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #273
kburman wrote: post #172

Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about. This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser th…

>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.

I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#480

Post by mbonnet »

mattthebaker wrote: post #442
simianparrot wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I don't really see the value proposition in being able to load and serve you ads faster, compared to a browser with a proper ad blocker.

The average user does not care about ads being present. Speed is paramount.
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