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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

#531

Post by glenstein »

cobbal wrote: post #452
glenstein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0] Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi. Bu…

Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels stupidly vulnerable to injection.

Definitely worth asking the devs about, they're active on HN.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#532

Post by giancarlostoro »

mythrwy wrote: post #69
everdrive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.

Communicating in pictographs

Gotta love them emojis

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#533

Post by mannanj »

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 AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#534

Post by mehdibl »

May be Mozilla have a point.

Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.

Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#535

Post by jerf »

mschuster91 wrote: post #516
pwg wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…

Clippy at least was funny, not creepy. And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.

The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent

Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)

That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#536

Post by wslh »

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.

Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking" (e.g. prompting)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#537

Post by duxup »

While back I figured I should support mozilla and I signed up for their VPN. It worked for a while but it felt like a hacky ad-on ontop of mulvad and then it just wouldn't work a lot of the time and I gave up.

I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#538

Post by JohnPDickerson »

berkes wrote: post #50

I don't want AI in Firefox. For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well". In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc. So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookma…

> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.

Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.

A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.

You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#539

Post by glenstein »

tempest_ wrote: post #333
probably_wrong wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#540

Post by exographicskip »

glenstein wrote: post #292
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…

This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time: (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation. (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some excep…

Thanks for this. Used Firefox since 1.0. Donate to their non-profit arm every month.

Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions.

Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.

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