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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

#561

Post by rkomorn »

dpark wrote: post #520
rkomorn wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My read on the whole Google Plus thing was that they drastically underestimated the difficulty of convincing people to actually use it. They clearly had the expertise to build it, and they had some interesting ideas with their circles of friends or whatever they called them (though I think they missed the mark on how they used them). But they couldn’t convince anyone to actually use it. Maybe I’m wrong and internally…

> Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so.

I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence you think you're not wrong. :)

At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as it proved to be.

I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same time, eg with circles).

(Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.

Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid take and an engaging comment.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#562

Post by rrr_oh_man »

xp84 wrote: post #487
netdevphoenix wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual…

Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today). Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new har…

iOS 6 was peak smartphone and I will die on that hill

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#563

Post by isodev »

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…

If you tell this to someone who has never used LLMs/AI they may be curious. I have though. I also understand how the technology works and that you will have to read those research papers yourself anyway, verify every source, check every fact (including the ones that got omitted). Maybe it’s better than previous gen machine translation, but you better not rely on context and subtle sentiments being translated as intended all the time.

If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#564

Post by tadfisher »

thesuitonym wrote: post #522
devilbunny wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope! Docs was an acquisition. Google Wave became Apache Wave, where software goes to die.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#565

Post by hidelooktropic »

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.

Yes. I want AI in some things (some)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#566

Post by bloppe »

railka wrote: post #153
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.

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.

Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#567

Post by mikestorrent »

simianparrot wrote: post #335
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,…

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.

The performance is fine and has always been fine for me, across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward. No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine, either.

Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#569

Post by wahnfrieden »

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.

I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#570

Post by mikestorrent »

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.

What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?
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