No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

Post by Turskarama » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

nullbound wrote: post #42

TheRealPomax wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want the people who make Firefox to make decisions about Firefox based on what users have been asking for instead of based on what a CEO of a for-profit decides is still not going to make them any money, just like every other plan that got pitched in the last 10 years that failed to turn their losing streak around. It's not a knee-jerk reaction to "AI", it's a perfectly reasonable reaction to Mozilla yet again sayi…

While I do sympathize with the thought behind it, general user is already equating llm chat box as 'better browsing'. In terms of simple positioning vis-a-vis non-technical audience, this is one integration that does make fiscal sense.. if mozilla was a real business. Now, personally, I would like to have sane defaults, where I can toggle stuff on and off, but we all know which way the wind blows in this case.

Post by CivBase » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

kevmo314 wrote: post #29

> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic. This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those…

Post by Groxx » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

koolala wrote: post #55

Did Firefox already add AI into Tabs? Today I just got my first 'Tab Grouping' and it says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". That's the worst way to do grouping ever... just group hierarchically based on where it opened from...

Post by kbelder » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

koolala wrote: post #58

Cheer2171 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs). From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable. Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-l…

I'm ok with Translation because it's best solved with AI. I'm not ok with it when Firefox "uses AI to read your open tabs" to do things that don't even need an AI based solution.

    local, open model
    local, proprietary model
    remote, open model (are there these?)
    remote, proprietary model

Post by kbelder » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 2:33 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #41

jazzyjackson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it. I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I do…

I’m not too worried about starting to write like a bot. But, I do notice that I’m sometimes blunt and demanding when I talk to a bot, and I’m worried that could leak through to my normal talking. I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no…