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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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the t…

> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?

The statement, more refined, would clarify, "publicly traded companies".

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#652
post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you sure this isn't perception bias? Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal" Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion. We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google…

yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value which we are discovering the value of. The claim is "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy does any of the things we've seen. In every case they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.

> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?

No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.

The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote

"It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox."

They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.

Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.

(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#653

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.

Good question.

I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.

AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.

The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the t…

> The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment. I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Sal…

I think you're mostly saying the same thing he is, just from a different viewpoint. It's still manglement trying to make their decisions look right.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#655

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,…

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…

> I notice people love to hate Firefox

They may be misplacing their hatred for Mozilla, which legitimately deserves the ire.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#656

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…

It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#657

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.

> Does anyone want AI in anything?

AI ad blocking might be nice.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#658
Lots of people saying things like, "This is not novel; come up with new ways to use this technology!" as if that's easy.

Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#659
I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory when I absolutely don't want it).

Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#660
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really, including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad happening. They used to have my full location data but offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where people are. I think people sometimes people worry about the wrong stuff.
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