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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

#521

Post by k1musab1 »

pessimizer wrote: post #473
benatkin wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#522

Post by thesuitonym »

devilbunny wrote: post #468
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.

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…

Google Wave didn't just go away, it became Google Docs.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#523

Post by noisy_boy »

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.

They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and text reader modes.

There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#524

Post by ajkjk »

godelski wrote: post #457
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,…

There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it. Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't. But we're also on a tech forum where peopl…

they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that "everything is being corrupted and turning against users over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend that it represents than the feature itself. We are soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely zero, and it's not right now... and since they're ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is especially jarring. When Google does something evil every day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla does something evil you're truly disappointed because they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the good guys.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#525

Post by abustamam »

andy99 wrote: post #70
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.

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…

Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to dismiss.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#526

Post by vitaflo »

crazygringo wrote: post #505
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.

> Does anyone want AI in anything? I most definitely do. I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it. I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an ad…

Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#527

Post by burnte »

creatonez wrote: post #499
mikkupikku wrote: post #466

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.

Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing. Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they th…

The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me?

AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.

I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#528

Post by janpio »

creatonez wrote: post #499
mikkupikku wrote: post #466

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.

Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing. Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they th…

Probably that it's a decent first step, with a well defined feature set and user expectations, so a nice thing to try before they figure out what to do next. And the article this comment thread is about is a reaction to one of their announcements in that regard: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#529

Post by mavamaarten »

creatonez wrote: post #499
mikkupikku wrote: post #466

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.

Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing. Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they th…

An AI that automatically clicks through cookie walls, declining everything: yes please!

Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#530

Post by exographicskip »

lone-cloud wrote: post #469

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 codebas…

Ladybird might be a good alternative in a couple years
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