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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
591–600 of 782 posts
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#592Earlier 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,…
> 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…
It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily depends on implied rather than explicit context. The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mea…
I assume people talk about transcription, not translation. Translation in youtube ime is indeed horrible in all languages I have tried, but transcription in english is good enough to be useful. However, the more technical jargon a video uses, the worse transcription is (translation is totally useless in anything technical there).
Automatic transcription in English heavily depend on accent, sound quality, and how well the speaker is articulating. It will often mistake words that sound alike to make non-sensible sentences, randomly skip words, or just inserts random words for no clear reason.
It does seem to do a few clever things. For lyrics it seem to first look for existing transcribed lyrics before making their own guesses (Timing however can be quite bad when it does this). Outside of that, AI transcribed videos is like an alien who has read a book on a dead language and is transcribing based on what the book say that the word should sound like phonetically. At times that can be good enough.
(A note on sound quality. It not the perceived quality. Many low res videos has perfectly acceptable, if somewhat lossy sound quality, but the transcriber goes insane. It likes prefer 1080p videos with what I assume much higher bit-rate for the sound.)
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings. https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
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 Plus was insanely disastrous. And there was a guy, generally well respected, who was in charge of search I think? who went around advocating for Google Plus on forums, and people responding: if one needs Google Plus to find things, doesn't that mean that search is bad? But he didn't seem to make the connection, or he pretended not to.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, De…
Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden nonsensical moves.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Yes. It's the hypocrisy that is annoying.
Google is expected to be evil so nobody is disappointed.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#597Mozilla 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…
You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.
> (1) They spend more on browser development now...
Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.
> (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...
This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
> (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).
> (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...
The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
> (5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...
You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
> (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.
You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#598Does 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.
Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that. in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's ju…
I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in vscode.
It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts).
It definitely has its place.
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#599M
Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. AI is generating a lot of buzz 2. AI could be the next technology revolution 3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor 4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind 5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment 6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they u…
Great breakdown. I'm starting to think I'd pay to disable AI in most products. Similar to how I read about a bar in the UK that has an intentional Faraday cage to encourage people to interact with people in the real world.
This sounds great actually. It seems like a fantastic revenue opportunity. We can add mandatory AI to all our products. We can then offer a basic plan that removes AI from most products, except in-demand ones. To remove it their you'll need the premium plan. There's a discount for annual subscription. You can also get the "Friends and Family" plan that covers 12 devices, but is region locked. If you go too far from your domicile, the AI comes back. This helps keep user indoors, streaming, and watching ads. Business plans will have the option to disable AI if their annual bill exceeds a certain amount. We can align this amount such that encourages typical business accounts to grow by a modest percent each year. We'll do this by setting the amount low enough that businesses are incentived to purchase but also high enough that they windup buying significant services from us. This potentially allows us to sell them services they don't need or that don't even exist, as the demand for AI free products is projected to rise in a 2-10 year timeframe.