I want to pull in AI on my own terms and don't want to feel I am constantly watched.
I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
551–560 of 782 posts
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#552Mozilla 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…
> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:
Firefox OS: 2013
Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Directory Tiles: 2014
Pocket acquisition: 2015
Firefox Focus: 2015
Cliqz experiment: 2017
"Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
That geographic concentration is a real thing. I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI every frickin' day and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate. [2] I'd really like to see Mozilla move anywhere…
My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub, with some component of their funding coming from the EU, where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.
What stops the EU from doing that now?
Regulation.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#554Earlier 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…
That's where I'm at with these. I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying. That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added…
I think a lot of the pushiness is a frantic effort to keep the bubble inflated and keep the market out of the trough of disillusionment. It won't work. The trough of disillusionment is inevitable. There is no jumping straight from peak of inflated expectations straight to the slope of enlightenment, because the market fundamentally needs the cleansing action of the trough of disillusionment to shake out the theoreticals and the maybes and get to what actually works.
Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and the things needing to prove themselves to get to real sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff is while they don't tell the market how few people actually chose to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a metric when it was pushed on them.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy? Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good. Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple…
> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]
They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.
1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-uninstall-goog...
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#556I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it need to do AI?
Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.
I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus,…
> they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
They do exactly that! Their endowment is now $1.2 billion and its year to year growth is one of their strongest non-Google revenue streams.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#558Nobody 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 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…
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-tri…
Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used!
ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#560Earlier 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…
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing. Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. Trouble is using a pro…
Bell icon in corner. Colored dot on bell. No need to overthink the UX on this beyond what color to make the dot.