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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

#711

Post by albedoa »

ajkjk wrote: post #652
godelski wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Perfectly said, bravo!

To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#712

Post by lmorchard »

creatonez wrote: post #552
glenstein wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020: Firefox OS: 2013 Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014 Directory Tiles: 2014 Pocket acquisition: 2015 Firefox Focus: 2015 Cliqz experiment: 2017 "Looking Glass" Mr. Rob…

> Firefox OS: 2013

Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)

> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014

Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.

> Directory Tiles: 2014

Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.

> Pocket acquisition: 2015

Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?

> Firefox Focus: 2015

Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?

> Cliqz experiment: 2017

That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?

> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017

I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.

Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#713

Post by t_mann »

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…

Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#714

Post by glenstein »

lmorchard wrote: post #712
creatonez wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020: Firefox OS: 2013 Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014 Directory Tiles: 2014 Pocket acquisition: 2015 Firefox Focus: 2015 Cliqz experiment: 2017 "Looking Glass" Mr. Rob…

> Firefox OS: 2013 Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it) > Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014 Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool. > Directory Tiles: 2014 Nearly ev…

I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.

Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.

The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).

So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#715

Post by glenstein »

exographicskip wrote: post #540
glenstein wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for this. Used Firefox since 1.0. Donate to their non-profit arm every month. Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions. Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.

Same! I remember when Firefox 2 and 3 were major marketing and media events, and the subject of great excitement from users almost akin to the release of a new iPhone.

I think it's unfortunate we got away from that cadence though I'm sure it was for good reasons I don't fully appreciate.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#716

Post by devilbunny »

jiggawatts wrote: post #693
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…

The reason Google Wave failed so spectacularly was that Google's Marketing team insisted on copying the "invite only rollout" that was so successful for Google Mail. The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites fee…

Huh? You sure didn’t need an invite for Wave when I was using it.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#717

Post by Kiro »

meatmanek wrote: post #603
Kiro wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but would love to be proven wrong.

Captions seem to have been updated sometime between 7 and 15 months ago. Here's a reddit post from 7 months ago noticing the update: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1kd9210/autocaptio... and here's Jeff Geerling 15 months ago showing how to use Whisper to make dramatically better captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M9NOtusM8 I assume Google has finally put some of their multimodal LLM work to good u…

Interesting. I wonder if people saying that they are useless base it on experiences before that and have had them turned off since.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#718

Post by jiggawatts »

devilbunny wrote: post #716
jiggawatts wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Google Wave failed so spectacularly was that Google's Marketing team insisted on copying the "invite only rollout" that was so successful for Google Mail. The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites fee…

Huh? You sure didn’t need an invite for Wave when I was using it.

https://creately.com/blog/customer/10-free-google-wave-invit...

https://www.newschoolers.com/news/read/Got-Google-Wave-Invit...

https://bolesblogs.com/2009/10/13/get-your-google-wave-invit...

https://googlewaveinvites.weebly.com/

And so on: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+wave%22+%22invites...

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#719

Post by berkes »

prophesi wrote: post #117
berkes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage. I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it utterly useless. Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case Mistral). The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu) hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for gpt, copil…

I was also frustrated by the short context length for summarizing and found you can increase it in about:config via: browser.ml.chat.maxLength

I googled* it and dod the same. But that merely moves the problem forward. Now the API returns errors that it's too large.

A smarter client would use a tool chain in which the first step is a model that's good at taking large contexts/data and extracting actual content from it. Many sites have a very low S/N ratio (readable content / dom).

Then pass that content, eg markdown, along to a model that's optimized at getting relevant parts out of content for the task at hand.

And only then onto the generic model to "do stuff" with it.

But many clients, including afaiks the Firefox one, just send the entire dom or html along to a generic model.

*Well DuckDuckGo

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#720

Post by frm88 »

wpm wrote: post #229
tcoff91 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.

Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?

For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?
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