Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

manualdousuario.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 782 posts

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#761

Post by cykros »

everdrive wrote: post #4

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.

What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#762

Post by anuramat »

PanoptesYC wrote: post #343
anuramat wrote: post #276

counterpoint: I want AI in firefox there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?

Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default. I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not s…

> good idea for them to make the features opt in

true, but that's not the same as "nobody wants AI"; them fucking it up once shouldn't mean that they should drop the entire idea; by this logic they should stop making browsers altogether

the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu

> local translation is already available

and it's already "AI"

> I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping ...

they already have a "suggest more tabs" thing that does exactly this using a local model; it's insanely slow, low quality, doesn't use gpu, but the idea is nice. I'm hoping they will continue working on it, as managing tabs across multiple windows is not exactly what I want to spend my time on, and it's exactly the type of a problem LLMs are perfect for

> never had issues with ads

it could always be better; there's always a certain amount of sites that either don't work at all or still show ads, and I imagine you could use a local VLM to hide elements based on the actual rendered result; same with cookie banners, annoying sign-in prompts, and so on -- how is this not the coolest thing ever? as long as you have like 8gb (v/u)ram, you could immediately unshittify most of the web

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#763

Post by anuramat »

jajuuka wrote: post #293
anuramat wrote: post #276

counterpoint: I want AI in firefox there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?

AI is unfortunately an umbrella term which people can project what they want on to. For reasonable people like yourself it's a tool to accomplish tasks. While for someone else it might be CoPilot showing up frequently and they don't disable or turn off the notifications and just get continually frustrated.

so why not give mozilla the benefit of the doubt? why assume that it's necessarily gonna be a slopfest? I'm not exactly optimistic, but it could be good, I do want those features, and I'm not gonna switch to something like chrome

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#764

Post by freehorse »

belorn wrote: post #593
freehorse wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

In the times I have noticed the transcription be bad, my speech comprehension itself is even worse. So I still find it useful. It is not substitution for human created (or at least curated) subtitles by any means, but better than nothing.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#765

Post by array_key_first »

moffkalast wrote: post #380
notepad0x90 wrote: post #110

I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't…

Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking, have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly. Currently they've at least got one of the three.

Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.

And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#766

Post by array_key_first »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #339

Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself. Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for..... browsing . They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025. Signed, a 20 year user.

Firefox IS a high performance browser that is nice to use. It has much more tab management features than chrome and the speed is indistinguishable!

I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#767

Post by burnte »

sejje wrote: post #648
burnte wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me? AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to pu…

> 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM. Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so they're more likely to need it than you.…

> It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.

Not at all, I just think going around seeing if AI fits is the same as going around with a hammer looking for nails. Let the problems lead you to a solution, don't start with "what can we solve with this?"

"You'll have computers in your home, you can look at a schedule or store recipes!" AI is being shoehorned in weird places, it's in the "kitchen recipes" stage where all we can come up with are chatbots. I think it's premature and wasteful, and will cost regular users a lot of money on wasted AI potential simply because these companies have to recoup some of their investment, even at the cost of user experience and utility.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#768

Post by TheRealPomax »

dwedge wrote: post #628
TheRealPomax wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias , you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience,…

They didn't poll 52 people, the 52 are comments

If you ask for feedback, and then you receive feedback, that is literally polled data: polling is the act of soliciting and then recording opinion-based data.

(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#769

Post by NoGravitas »

zgk7iqea wrote: post #233
noir_lord wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false browser.ml.chat.menu set to false browser.ml.chat.page set to false browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false browser.ml.enable set to false browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabl…

This is just as user friendly as the rest of the firefox configuration. I can't recommend it to anyone in good faith anymore.

They are promising to, along with the AI tab misfeature, add one button in preferences to turn off all the AI features.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#770

Post by NoGravitas »

clueless wrote: post #377
rs186 wrote: post #86

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of t…

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on.... Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

I have used WebUSB exactly once: to use the GrapheneOS webinstaller. I keep a copy of Chromium around and use it about once a year for some kind of nonsense along these lines.
Post reply on HN