Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing • Hacker News Board

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#81

Post by nosioptar » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

Good4boothee wrote: post #23

Madmallard wrote: post #14

"Private" Guess we just using buzzwords for marketing and have no morality or principles anymore. Bad timeline and people you should just not trust.

All previous similar issues got hand waved with "Mozilla has to make money somehow". I am afraid one day remaining users will decide that Chromium based browsers provide a better experience in most use cases, and now have same privacy guarantees as Firefox. Looking at market share maybe that had already happened and pragmatism won over ideology, and we will all suffer the consequences of such monoculture.

[flagged]

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#82

Post by nosioptar » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

hollow-moe wrote: post #15

Glad to use ~~Unmozilled Firefox~~ Librewolf

Palemoon doesn't embed clankers as far as I know.

SeaMonkey exists. But, I'm sure Mozilla will fuck it up if they ever remember it exists.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#83

Post by Barbing » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

jimmydoe wrote: post #76

walrus01 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand. But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser. You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of ex…

Agree, advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists(people who can afford large RAM and GPU) is absurd.

>advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists

?:

>marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#84

Post by Barbing » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

fn-mote wrote: post #22

karussell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?) I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.

> Nowhere in the news they say it is offline Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”. How else could the information be kept private? I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.

>like Apple’s Private Relay

Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)

(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#85

Post by lukan » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

HappyPanacea wrote: post #68

walrus01 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has been in a bit of a recursive feedback loop death spiral for years now of: Browser loses market share -> try some weird thing -> very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share -> management says "oh shit we're losing market share we better try some weird thing" I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least…

very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)

I very much think it did, because FF once was recommended by us nerds, we installed it for people and praised it. And that made an impact outside of our circles.

Now I still occasionaly install it along with ublock origin because there is no alternative, but I don't praise it anymore (or bother to install it for someone in the first place) - but rather bitch about how they also sneak in advertisement and spyware.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#86

Post by micromacrofoot » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

estebarb wrote: post #78

I really do not get the obsession with translation, particularly bad translations and translating by default. Most people who browse websites in languages other than the official local one are fluent in that other language. Google Chrome keeps insisting that Spanish is Galician. PowerPoint insists on changing the spell checker back to the wrong language and ignores setting the language for the whole presentation. On…

I don't know many people, but I do know someone that relies on machine translation to browse the English web. Remember "most" is not "all." The web should be accessible to every single person.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#87

Post by syntaxing » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

It’s not obvious but you can use this with your own local (or any) models.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#88

Post by well_ackshually » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

Barbing wrote: post #83

jimmydoe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists(people who can afford large RAM and GPU) is absurd.

>advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists ?: >marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain

The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it.

Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#89

Post by djray » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

They misspelled their own company name:

"...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world"

A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here.

I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#90

Post by AstralSerenity » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

djray wrote: post #89

They misspelled their own company name: "...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world" A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here. I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.

On the bright side, at least we know it was typed by human hands!