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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

#681

Post by dcminter »

dpark wrote: post #467
taeric wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it. Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”

I think I could pretty easily have been persuaded by Google Plus. At that time I had broadly positive sentiments towards Google. Two things put me off.

Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+] logins. That rubbed me the wrong way.

Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different "circles" of friends. It sounded very complicated and I was worried that I'd publish something snarky to the wrong group of friends :)

I wonder how many others had the same concern? Given that Steve Yegge accidentally published one of his rants to the public that was meant purely for internal Google consumption (I think that was on G+ ...?) that might have been a legit thing to be wary of.

There was also the very minor annoyance of G+ taking over the + operator in Google search (previously you could say +keyword instead of "keyword" to force literal search), but I don't think that would have swayed me against joining.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#682

Post by mccr8 »

zgk7iqea wrote: post #241
railka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.

One longstanding issue with gradients was fixed recently.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#683

Post by notepad0x90 »

bakugo wrote: post #677
notepad0x90 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.

> grandma isn't a beta tester Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is. If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.

yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and clicking around.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#684

Post by fleeting900 »

data-ottawa wrote: post #288
andy99 wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

Even when I do try them I find myself let down. I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences. If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out. Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their tim…

Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”

As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#685

Post by PaulHoule »

plorg wrote: post #576
tadfisher wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell icon in corner. Colored dot on bell. No need to overthink the UX on this beyond what color to make the dot.

Can I dismiss that distracting little pip without having to click through a tutorial for every new feature? Can I just turn this off? This is especially irritating when, say, you set up a new phone and the app treats you as if you've never used it before.

It’s funny because lately I’ve been playing Arknights which is a gatcha game which is unusually good for free players. It has a few icons that light up with one of those dots when you have something to attend to (say you got a token to upgrade a character) but there is the dark pattern that that dot is always set on the cash store which means it is always set on the “stores” section which has substores for in-game currencies some of which you have to attend to periodically. So I see the dark pattern there.

Really my complaint is anything that covers up content; if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px above or below the page to show me something I’d complain about lot less — but if I had my way anything unwanted that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don’t want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car or truck!)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#686

Post by dpark »

dcminter wrote: post #681
dpark wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it. Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”

I think I could pretty easily have been persuaded by Google Plus. At that time I had broadly positive sentiments towards Google. Two things put me off. Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+] logins. That rubbed me the wrong way. Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different "circles" of friend…

All that is true, but the primary problem with Google Plus was the network effect. Whenever I logged into Google plus, most of the content from friends was basically “cool, so this is Google plus” and nothing else, because everything at the time was on Facebook. Later Google started filling my feed with stuff from strangers because there was no organic content from people I actually cared about.

If you can’t solve the chicken and egg problem of engagement then nothing else really matters.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#687

Post by pseudalopex »

BearOso wrote: post #61
aquova wrote: post #23

Earlier 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,…

The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.

> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.

You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#689

Post by tempest_ »

hbn wrote: post #656
tempest_ wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure.

For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.

FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.

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