I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
And yea, having a faint through about removing adblock support, yet alone speaking it aloud is a really bad sign for Mozilla's future.
I am waiting for a serious fork of Mozilla to emerge at this point that pays the maintainers better in a bid to overtake Mozilla itself. People would donate to get a better browser, people dont donate because Mozilla wastes all their donor funds on nonsense.
I kind of gave up hope tbh. I still use Firefox but I am waiting for ladybug. It will probably take a couple of years to get there, but it’s what I would have wanted Firefox to be.
I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously.
Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
I "forgive" them too, I have no animosity towards them and wish them the best. I just think that the name communicates a lack of seriousness. That's not a criticism, I have plenty of non-serious projects
Unless you purchased some service from them, you didn't donate to Firefox, because that's a Mozilla Corporation project. Donating to Mozilla Foundation funds their initiatives, but not Firefox.
To Thunderbird, however, we can actually donate to.
At one point, paying for Mozilla's mullvad rebadge would give money to the corp. If you were already going to pay for a VPN, then it's effectively a donation.
Though, just because money goes to the corp, doesn't mean it will contribute to Firefox' development either.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works.
And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic.
> Give us more extensibility instead.
True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL.
> Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more.
Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
> There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?
> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
Yes and that's a good thing
> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?
It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
> Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed.
Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.
AFAIR Mozilla is firmly against introducing new stuff that could be used for fingerprinting and that was their (and Apple's) rationale for not implementing it. That's a noble goal for sure, but peripheral access is a genuinely useful feature now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. You don't like JS having access to everything - fine, but than we need some other way to do this (without porting everything to native).
> now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform.
I feel like we can continue to resist this, although I admit it's getting more and more futile every year. It's like trying to hold back the tide. I personally don't want the web to be an application platform. The web is for browsing web pages. I have an application platform on my computer already.
I see your point. But there is an objective need for a some common ground to applications on. Something with zero install friction and proper sandbox isolation.
Because the alternative isn't "yes, we are providing Linux and MacOS-arm64 binaries", the alternative is "here is your Win32 blob that is broken on wine because screw you that's why" or "here is a .jar with a horrible awt fronts that is also broken unless you run it under an ancient JRT" - and that's on user's side, on developer's side it's even worse. I feel that web becoming an application platform was net negative for the web, but positive for every other platform (and users and developers as well). Yes, it makes web crappy, but we need some crappy platform where all the crap goes - and at least the browser contains the crap well.
Or we can accept it, make a good access control system in an app platform for once, and add the few missing parts that the web standards are still missing so it becomes a good platform.
And none of that requires that we give up on an entire facade focused on reading text.
But if Mozilla focus on resisting, they can't do that, and honestly, nobody else out there will.
Unless you can't afford the split focus. If Mozilla can do 1 thing right or 2 things half-assed, and it looks like this is the case, they should stop and focus on strengthening the core before hanging more stuff around it.
I didn't mean it just in terms of money. We can see they don't have the ability to deliver on both fronts so maybe start with one, the more important core of the browser.
If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread, Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them, invested minimal resources in others (accepting donations in crypto), and modest resources in VR (which you'd expect given the browser-VR integration standards forming).
So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
> If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Yeah, I'm not searching 500 posts for this..
> Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread
Who is Christophe Henry? Is this some namecalling?
> Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them,
That doesn't make it better, being somewhat selective is also normal. Most companies don't have the resources to follow literally every fad.
> So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
That's the point. Communication of Mozilla is so awful, their whole public picture is how wasteful they are with money, throwing it at pointless dead on arrival-projects. Here are two lists with them [1], [2], this is not a small number of failed projects. They are not even including the small changes in the browser itself.
It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox.
Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.
- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism
- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform
2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features
- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes
- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones
- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.
3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras
- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.
- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.
- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe
- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services
- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux
- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management
4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots
- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons
- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape
5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
Steps 2 and 1 should probably be swapped, but I wouldn't say the rest of what I listed are fads, but what they'd need to become a real and complete alternative to the current ecosystems.
Ok so walk me through how _only_ focusing on the browser core will make them money other than continuing to be dependent on Google. How can they diversify their revenue streams?
I agree they should make the browser core good, but right now they are entirely dependent on their biggest competitor.
Falling behind on the browser core makes users leave Firefox because the one non-negotiable requirement users have is that the browser works on the websites they need it to work on. Literally nothing else Mozilla tries to do to diversify their revenue streams will matter if the browser they're trying to build it on top of is not sound and functional.
If they weren't slipping on the core browser as much as they have been, there wouldn't be nearly as many shouts as there are today when they instead spend resources on chasing the latest fad.
- Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox).
- Start crowdfunding for features.
- Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech.
- Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech.
None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have?
- Their engineering team? Maybe.
- The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem).
- Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular.
Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point.
The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.
> - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox).
>
> - Start crowdfunding for features.
Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well).
I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work.
If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.
The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now.
Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments.
I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI.
Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something.
> Mozilla keeps jumping on fads
Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.
If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it.
If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that.
But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"
"AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet.
I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.
I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.
If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.
There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.
On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?
Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.
And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.
And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.
But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.
Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
I just force quit Firefox because it was slowing the macbook with loads of memory use for nothing much running. On with Chrome... They should that sort of thing?
> The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core
Nah, the problem is people just want to hate on Mozilla. I mean even that Mastadon thread they bring up people hating on Mozilla for accepting crypto donations and are equating it to putting a miner in the browser. Like what a fucking joke. It's such a crazy exaggeration of what actually happened. Company just adds new way for people to give them money (which they desperately need) and then everyone gets upset.
How is this not laughable?
Now we're seeing a similar thing. Everyone is talking about fucking LLMs. What, do you think FF is going to start shipping a 100GB browser? Even Llama-8B is >15GB. That would be ridiculous!
No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search. Seriously, go to their Labs tab! They let you opt in to try a feature to semantically search your browser history. That's not an LLM, that's a vector embedding model! What are they going to do next? Semantic search of a webpage? Regex search?! Even in their announcement the other day they mention the iOS "shake to summarize" and that's not even an AI they're shipping it's just a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. The only other thing they've announced is what already exists, a shortcut to use your chatbot of choice. That's not AI in the browser it is literally a split window.
| Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon.[1]
> having a faint through about removing adblock support
Don't be so fucking disingenuous.
They said literally the opposite[1]
| At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
That's not even a quote from him, that's a summarization of their conversation and it literally says that removing ad blockers is against their mission.
Literally the opposite of what you're suggestion.
Sorry, people just want to hate on Firefox.
Look, if anyone wants to be a power user there's nothing Firefox is doing from stopping them from using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet? How fucking stupid are we? We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold? It's just laughable at how much we love shooting ourselves in the foot here. We've been playing this same stupid fucking game for years and watching Chrome take more and more market share. Let FF be the browser for the masses and use a fucking fork if you care about true Scottsmen. It takes literally no technical skill to click download on a different webpage. Seriously, this is so fucking dumb.
I'm just going to link this from further down the main post. The two toots summarize it well[2]
[0] You literally have to download the translation models!
I agree that the forks are the pressure release valves here. Would strongly consider switching to a fork myself.
But still I'm just wrenched by the dissonance in what new-CEO-guy said. 5 years ago or so I reported a serious bug in pointer events. If you move the mouse less than 1px the browser 5-10% of the time Firefox reports to JS that the you moved the cursor ~400pixels up and to the right or left.
Honestly this bug isn't super high impact for the web as a whole, but anyone who uses pointer events needs to work around it by smoothing the input stream. They confirmed the bug in their tracker and there it has sat for five years with no activity while the browser behaves in violation of the contract between the user and the web platform, putting an extra stumbling block in the way of every web application that allows drawing on screen with the mouse cursor.
To me, an issue like that is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dead. There's only a few reasons I can think of to leave a perfectly-reproduceable issue like that sitting for five years: 1) you don't have the energy for it, probably because so many other things are on fire 2) you don't see any value in having the trust of your users. or 3) your code is so fucked up inside that there's just no hope of figuring out why a half-pixel movement triggers a mouse would do something insane like trigger a mouse event 400 pixels away.
So now this new CEO guy comes along and says "we've lost people's trust." Wow, I think to myself, he really gets it!" Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?
Did you not literally just say you recognized that you had lost people's trust? Did you think that people didn't trust you because you hadn't tasked every engineer that wants to be able to get a promotion to work on AI!?
> Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?
I don't think adding a fucking shortcut to ChatGPT is "top priority" or even time consuming.
Did you even look at what they're calling "AI Mode" in that link? They call it "AI Window". It's the same fucking thing as the window where you can opt in to using chatbots. That's nowhere near the same thing as pushing AI on us
> using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
The thing is most of the forks are still using some/all of the on device ML models, they're just not advertising them as AI. From Waterfoxs announcement of "Not using AI*"
>The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither.
While that may describe a few people, I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.
I want to love on Firefox. I've been using it since before it was "Firefox." I've championed it among co-workers and friends tirelessly. But over time, Firefox has become more and more unlovable, getting softer on privacy, altering settings in updates, foisting 'experiments' off on us, and now this AI nonsense.
I'm part of a large makerspace and have watched their market share dwindle among the nerds. Virtually no one is left.
> I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.
People are saying LLMs are being forced on them. That's just not true. So yeah, I'm sticking with what I said.
Again, FF added shortcuts to the 5th most popular site in the world. So what. They also have shortcuts to Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites with their bangs. The split window for the chatbot sites? That's barely any bloat and you're not forced to use that. Nor is it even close to shipping you an LLM.
And the translate is completely opt-in. You have to fucking download the translations! They also aren't LLMs. They're like 50MB lol. But they're opt-in!
> foisting 'experiments' off on us
The Mr Robot thing? Hell yeah I was pissed about that. And that's a legitimate reason to be pissed. But have they tried that again? If they learned they learned and let's move on (even with extra caution).
But if we're grabbing pitchforks for fiction then why should they care when we grab pitchforks for reality? Literally boy who cries wolf situation here and that's why I'm calling it laughable. Just as it is laughable when the OP doubled down and called the accepting of crypto donations like wearing a swastika. It is just ridiculously disingenuous and delegitimizes any serious complaints. So it is entirely counterproductive.
I'll save my pitchfork when the bullshit becomes real, not when the bullshit is based on flimsy rumors and egregious mischaracterizations. That's a witch hunt, and I don't want any part of that.
True. But crypto is bad publicity and everyone knows it. At that point it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign (sorry, Poe's law triggered) and saying it's an ancient Buddhist symbol.
> No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search
Did you read my comment? The problem is that this takes focus away from the browser core. Why did they kill Servo? Were are XUL API replacements that were promised? The AI fluff could have been an extension - and that would keep everyone happy.
> It feels off-mission.
Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all. Unless that's a vibe check that's it. Somebody already posted an xkcd of it, I'm just doubling: https://xkcd.com/463/
> We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold?
Unfortunately it's pretty hard to define where "hand aren't made of gold" stops and "gotta call a HAZMAT decontamination team" starts.
> Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet?
The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well. It didn't lasted because of inherit incentives issue. And so if Mozilla is the last line of defense it'd better have some distinguishing features other than "we are not google". Because if they keep focusing on "average user" (btw it's my firm belief that the said user doesn't exist outside management's heads) their incentives wouldn't be any different.
> So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
That's what I'm doing personally. But the forks barely have resources to remove the crap, yet alone implement new features.
> it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign
Come on, I'm far from a crypto fanboy but this is just making my case. It's incredibly egregious. You can call crypto a bullshit fad loved by scammers without saying anyone that accepts it is a Nazi.
I don't see anyone getting all up in arms about the Wayback Machine, The EFF, or plenty of others who accept cryptocurrencies as payments.
And again, to equate it to shipping a miner in the browser is BEYOND EGREGIOUS. It is nothing short of laughable.
> Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all.
We don't know the full context since it is summarized. Maybe he was explicitly asked. But honestly I read it as a bad joke along the lines of "we could be evil and greedy if we really wanted money, but we're not." But I don't know how you can read what was actually written as anything remotely close to suggesting they might even consider blocking ad blockers. At best it is making mountains out of mole hills but even that is being generous to your interpretation.
> The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well.
This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil. But Google does. And whatever the situation is, Google having competition and being tied up from implementing evil is a good thing. In the worst situation, assuming Mozilla is more evil than Google (lol), it buys us more time for another player who isn't evil to enter the space and gain browser market share. But if we let Google kill Firefox then that 3rd player is going to have a much harder barrier to entry.
So yeah, I'm sticking with laughable. Because all you're accomplishing is handing market share to Google. All you're doing is repeating the same thing that's been happening for years. Crypto, AI, whatever, it is the same thing. People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
> This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil.
I guess that's where we disagree a lot. If Google monopolizes the web completely, it'll end up with the web dying as a relevant platform. Just like it happened with Win32 (sure, after a decade or so of constant suffering), just like it happened to minis&mainframes. Because, let's face it, being a platform monopolist isn't very profitable unless you are screwing the developers and users so hard they'll jump on the first opportunity. And it's not like the web isn't worth saving as it is now, but it is not worth saving if it is going to turn into corporate crap.
> . People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
People expect a lawnmower to chop off their hands if they stick one into it. People don't expect a nonprofit declaring their dedication to freedoms to chop their hands off - and not even single fingers. Yes, declaring moral superiority means you will be judged a lot.
> You can call crypto a bullshit fad loved by scammers without saying anyone that accepts it is a Nazi.
I'm actually mostly on your side in this debate, but to clarify that's not actually what I think they were saying here. I think they were talking about folks who argue that the swastiki was a Buddhist symbol first so it's fine to wear it in public... They aren't technically wrong they're just assholes.
He was comparing that attitude to folks who endorse crypto, not literally calling them Nazi's.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core
No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is.
You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.
And how exactly is the AI going to give Mozilla money? I mean not investor money, but actual profit? By alienating their moat userbase (privacy-minded technies)? Because if not for the AI haters, nobody would care about Firefox __at all__.
Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.
Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.
By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.
A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need.
> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.
Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.
I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.
They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
Fully disagree. I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one. Why do I need them in my browser, and why does my browser need to focus on something that, several years into the hype wave, I still *do not use at all*? And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I'd be elated if Firefox solely focused on "the pre-AI era", as you put it, and many other power users would, too. And I somehow doubt my non-techie family cares - if anything, they're tired of seeing the stupid sparkle icons crammed down their throats at every single corner of the world now.
There are many features you are not using in all your software. Just being there, should not be a problem for people. You should evaluate a software by what it's giving you, and which harm it brings, not by what it's giving others you do not care about.
And so far, we can assume that AI in Firefox will be like all the other stuff people don't care about, just optional, a button here, a menu-entry there, just waiting for interaction, but not harmful.
I agree, why support pushing the masses into another big tech machinery that just rips off their data and collectively makes it worse for all of us again? We are already way too cool with people frying their brains on X, TikTok, Instagram and whatnot. If anything, as devs, we should help people get back to focus on their own lifes over monetization of attentionspans. But this industry has no backbone and is constantly letting people down for a quick buck.
AI tools are here to stay. They will start to creep into everything, everywhere, all the time. Either you recognize the moment at which it becomes a significant disadvantage not to use them (I agree that moment is not now), or get left behind.
The metaverse is here to stay! Blockchain is the future!
Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!
They did actually jump on metaverse with Firefox reality and Mozilla hubs. Both weren't bad products at all. Both are now cancelled and they have done basically nothing for Mozilla's market position.
Edit: so I mean I agree here in case that wasn't clear
Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:
There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.
Compare and contrast with AI:
LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.
I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)
Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.
Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).
I don't think it's quite that simple. A great deal of work has nothing to do with computers, and even more human activity has nothing to do with economic advantage. The scope of your statement is a bit too broad in that regard but for computer based work I think you are a) more or less right but b) if you are right it's not clear how much economic benefit LLMs will actually provide on balance, long term.
Does it make the world a better place, and more prosperous? Does it just move economic activity around a bit in regards to who is doing what? We'll find out in ten years when the retrospective economic studies are done.
I disagree and I think the moment is now. Gemini 2.5 and now 3.0 is incredible. People that don’t recognize that and use AI tools now are as silly as a craftsman that uses a hammer as a screwdriver when he has a screwdriver in his toolbox. A good craftsman uses the right tool for the job to save time and do a better job and knows the limitations of each tool.
I can spend hours learning photoshop and then trying out color schemes for my new intricately detailed historic house or removing a car from the driveway or I can use Nano Banana and be done in a prompt. There is dignity in learning all that minutiae but I don’t care, I’m not a Photoshop artist, I just want the result and to just move on with my life and get the house painted.
AI crap has already been crammed into everything for months now, and nobody like it nor wants it. There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.
> There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.
While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out, there's definitely evidence that the models can keep improving until that point.
"Sooner or later", given the trend lines, is sill enough to do to SWEng what Wikipedia did to Encyclopædia Britannica: Still exists, but utterly changed.
> While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out
This will certainly happen with the models that use weird proprietary licenses, which people only contribute to if they're being paid, but open ones can continue beyond that point.
You are right, machine learning models usually improve with more data and more parameters. Open model will never have enough resources to reach a compatible quality.
However, this technology is not magic, it is still just statistics, and during inference it looks very much like your run of the mill curve fitting (just in a billion parameter space). An inherent problem in regression analysis is that at some point you have too many parameters, and you are actually fitting the random errors in your sample (called overfitting). I think this puts an upper limit on the capabilities of LLMs, just like it does for the rest of our known tools of statistics.
There is a way to prevent that though, you can reduce the number of parameters and train a specialized model. I would actually argue that this is the future of AI algorithms and LLMs are kind of a dead end with usefulness limited to entertainment (as a very expensive toy). And that current applications of LLMs will be replaced by specialized models with fewer parameters, and hence much much much cheaper to train and run. Specialized models predate LLMs and we have a good idea of how an open source model fares in that market.
And it turns out, open source specialized models have proven them selves quite nicely actually. In go we have KataGo which is one of the best models on the market. Similarly in chess we have Stockfish.
> I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I recently listened to a podcast (probably The Verge) talking about how an author was suddenly getting more purchases from his personal website. He attributed it to AI chatbots giving his personal website as the best place to buy rather than Amazon, etc. An AI browser might be a way to take power away from all the big players.
> And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I suspect I only Google for about 1/4 of things I used to (maybe less). Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
While I am a techie and I do use Firefox -- that's not a growing niche. I think AI will become spectacularly better for non-techies because it can simply give them what they ask for. LLMs have solved the natural language query issue.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
> Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
I think half the people who think AI is incredibly dumb and can't understand why anyone is using it is because they're using the free samples. This whole thing is so horribly expensive that they lose money even on people who pay therefore the free samples are necessarily as minimal as they can get away with.
The free samples worked famously initially to get people to try it initially, though.
But whenever that free Gemini text pops up in my search, I know why people think it's stupid. But that's not the experience I have with paid options.
> > I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I had to use a ledger database at work for audit trails because they were hotness. I think we were one of the few that actually used AWS QLDB.
The experience I've had with people submitting AI generated code has been poor. Poor performing code, poor quality code using deprecated methods and overly complex functionality, and then poor understanding of why the various models chose to do it that way.
I've not actually seen a selling point for me, and "because Google is enshittifying its searches" is pretty weak.
I've been posting recently how I refactored a few different code bases with the help of AI. Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller. AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe: incredibly powerful but only if you understand exactly what you're doing otherwise it will happily make a big mess.
That question completely misunderstands what AI is for. Why would I just do it when the AI did it for me in less time that I could myself and mechanically in a way that is arguably harder for a human to do? AI is surprisingly good at identifying all the edge cases.
i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?
but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.
It seems to me you're coming in with a negative preconceptions (e.g. "insipid, pandering chatbot"). What part about coding is fun for you? What part is boring? Keep the fun bits and take the boring bits and have the LLM do those.
> I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
Why would I accept slop out of the AI? I don't. So I don't have any.
I don't understand the disconnect here. Some people really want to be extremely negative about this pretty amazing technology while the rest of us have just incorporated it into our workflow.
I don't, hence why I have to take your word for it.
The PRs that people have submitted where they either told me up front or admitted to using AI after the review probed as to why they would be inconsistent in their library usage were not good and required substantial rework.
Yes, some people may submit PRs that used AI and were good. But if so, they haven't told me but I would have hoped that people advocating it would have either told me or got me to review, said it is good, and then told me it was a test and the AI passed. So far that hasn't happened, so I'm not convinced it's a regular occurrence.
Maybe the problem with understanding the benefits of AI is that you are relying on other people to use AI properly. As the direct user myself, I don't have that problem.
I'm using it to make things better rather than just producing. Even just putting it in agent mode and saying "look at all my code and tell me where I can make it better" is an interesting exercise. Some suggestions I take, some I don't.
> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.
> Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
There was also no expectation of process isolation in Mozilla Firefox when Google Chrome first came into the scenes. Electrolysis was painful for Mozilla and yet it was necessary.
So instead of being flexible enough to adapt to new requirements as users demand them, they are blindly implementing things before they are requested just in case?
Believe it or not well-intentioned developers, product managers, etc can read the writing on the wall and see where user expectations are heading based on the apps and products they already use.
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own.
More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now.
> I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
> I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Being against the random inclusion of AI in the browser, isnt the same as being against AI completely. It needs to justify its presence.
Firefox needs to immediately build Candy Crush into the browser. Users expect to be able to access Candy Crush and only at the layer of web browser can such a thing be implemented.
Co-worker was talking about how he tried to make invitation card with chatgpt, just a picture of his house and text and AI failed to do it. It said he didn't have copyright to the picture and used another random pic, layout was wrong etc.
Then younger co-worker gave tips how to do it, what tools to use and offered to make it with his better AI program.
What could be done in few minutes with a free program is now multiple hours with billion dollar AI tools and you have less control what the end result is.
And assuming people want deeper integration is the browser even the right level of abstraction? Arguably it would be better to have something that was operating at the OS level, like siri/gemini assistant style.
When Microsoft completely integrates its LLM into Windows, would you rather give that access to your browser, or would you rather plug in your own local model / turn it off entirely while browsing?
If a global LLM becomes standard, I'd want to plug in my own local model or disable it entirely, but I don't think Microsoft nor Apple are going to open up their operating systems and make it easy to do that any time soon. The option to granularly use your own models is a plus to me in that situation.
Every app has to open itself for integration, especially if it's not a native app like Firefox. From where they get the AI at the end doesn't really matter, they will support them all anyway.
Filling out forms, booking tickets, summarizing content ...
Even at work, have seen few junior developers use AI browsers to attend mandatory compliance courses and complete quizzes. Not necessarily a good thing but AI browsers may win in the end and it might be too late for Firefox.
"why do I have to go and fill with copy paste that form or navigate through that page to do $something if that AI browser can do it for me?"
And in that scenario, there is a GIGANTIC need for a user-first, privacy-respecting browser using ideally local models (in a few years, when HW is ready)
You people need to be forced to use your product in the exact form your product is presented to end users. With the exact frequency it's presented to end users. In all the wrong places as it is presented to end users.
Maybe then you'll understand why shoving AI in every conceivable crevice is incredibly obnoxious and distracting and, most importantly, not useful.
Shoving an AI agent in every website is distracting and not that useful.
Shoving an AI agent in every app is distracting as well.
Having one global AI agent per operating system or browser (where most of the digital life happens, in the case of desktop browsers), for the people that want to have an AI agent, it's probably going to be useful, if well implemented.
I know, but at the end of the day most people nowadays do the vast majority of their job in a browser, and there is already a well defined API to manage its content. Also browsers are coming there faster and at some point it will become what people expect, rather what's most optimal.
Last I checked Firefox was sitting at 4% browser market share. If you include Brave you just get to 5%[0].
So truth is that privacy isn't enough to get people to switch. 5% share isn't enough to stay alive and protect privacy.
> they are blindly implementing things before they are requested
This is the job of every engineer. Your job is to understand the product and where it advances and where it can help the users. The users don't know the technical side. They barely know what they want. Yes, you should listen to users but you also have to read between the lines to actually figure out what they want. Frankly, the truth of the matter is that what people say they want is very different than what they actually want.
Work with customers and you'll experience this first hand... I thought it was a big enough meme that everyone knew this
Speaking about reading between the lines, the privacy community is not very good at advocating for privacy. Look at Signal, it has similar backlash to Mozilla. The community shoots itself in the foot because the products are not perfect. But here's the thing, both Signal and Firefox are not products intended to maximize privacy at all costs. They are products to maximize privacy while being appealing to the masses. Are there more secure and private solutions out there? Hell yeah. But are those tools practical for the masses? Don't fool yourselves.
So stop with this bullshit, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You don't have to use Firefox to root for them. Go use a fork like the Mullvad browser or Waterfox. If you're a power user then just be a fucking power user. I use Arch but that doesn't mean I'm going to piss on Ubuntu every chance I get. I fucking hate Ubuntu but I'm going to root for them because every new Ubuntu user is one less for Microsoft and Apple and every new Ubuntu user is a potential new <literally any other distro is better> user. So why get angry because someone is making a step in the right direction? So what if their legs aren't long enough to get all the way to where you are (which didn't take one step either!).
So let's be very clear about this. I'm not mad at you because I want AI in Firefox (I don't), I'm mad at you because you're attacking our literal last line of defense for a secure and private internet. I'm mad at you for purity testing. Stop with this "no true Scotsman" bullshit. We can have those arguments at a later date when Firefox isn't on its last leg and/or when we have a diverse choice in browsers. But at this point *all you are doing is advocating for Chrome*. Whether you realize it our not. We've been playing this fucking game for a decade now and you can either look at the results or continue to ignore them. But it didn't work, so we need to try something else.
No its not. Engineering is about right sizing the product. This is not that. Theres no user story, theres no pressing demand. Every CTO in the world might be racing to force AI into their products regardless of utility but there's no reason to pretend this is being done for good engineering reasons.
>Work with customers and you'll experience this first hand.
Theres no customer benefit to shoving AI in every application at every layer. This is not about the customer. This is about a race to cram the feature in every conceivable space and see where it sticks. This is corporate and has no sense of good engineering. They also don't want it. What a combo. No utility and no demand. If anything its a bit like the story of fish fingers, where the pressing need, was the big warehouse full of unwanted fish bits that they wanted to move, and the innovation was productising it in such a way that people would actually purchase and consume it. In this case we have DC's full of AI cards that desperately want a market. It might be uncharitable, but I do wonder if the Mozilla Foundation has been promised some financial reward if they solve this issue.
There has not been any demonstrable requirements gathering for this change. An executive directed this, and to pretend otherwise is insane.
>Speaking about reading between the lines, the privacy community is not very good at advocating for privacy.
No they aren't very good at it at all, but that's a massive non sequitur.
>So stop with this bullshit, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
No, defending Firefox from valid criticism is the self inflicted injury.
>I use Arch but that doesn't mean I'm going to piss on Ubuntu every chance I get.
Ok, but I would think it fair and reasonable to criticise Ubuntu if they decided to randomly cram an opt out LLM into the distro, and I think your criticism of them also deserves to be heard. You dont need to be the Ubuntu or Firefox internet defense force.
>So why get angry because someone is making a step in the right direction?
I haven't been angry at a single firefox user here, I would ask you to stop making things up just to be angry about. There's not an ounce of "Boycott" or anything in my posts. I am writing this from firefox. I am permitted, to be critical of the browser I am using.
>I'm mad at you because you're attacking our literal last line of defense for a secure and private internet.
"Attacking". Its clearly necessary criticism. The devaluing of the product is coming from inside the house. Their chief rival is, critically, releasing a separate browser to test their AI features in. For Chrome itself Gemini is in the extension store. It is OPT IN, not OPT OUT. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gemini-for-chrome/a... Their chief rival is respecting end user consent better. If you want them to be a more popular browser, why don't you hold them to a better standard than Chrome, instead of policing the critics?
(Also boo for making me open chrome to check)
>Stop with this "no true Scotsman" bullshit.
I literally cannot identify a no true scotsman argument in my comments. Theres a difference between saying "No TRUE web browser would" and pointing out validly that there's no interest or demand in the feature being rolled out. If anything, the closest thing in this thread to a no true scotsman, while still failing it technically, is the idea that you cant be a true supporter of privacy while being critical of Mozilla.
>We can have those arguments at a later date when Firefox isn't on its last leg and/or when we have a diverse choice in browsers.
No now is a great time.
>But at this point all you are doing is advocating for Chrome.
No I am asking them to be competitive with chrome, and treat users that well or better.
>But it didn't work, so we need to try something else.
> no customer benefit to shoving AI in every application at every layer.
What AI has been shoved down your throat?
Translate requires you to download the model for language pairs. That's opt-in.
The chatbots aren't chatbots, they're just a fucking shortcut to the 5th most popular website on the internet.
I hate to break it to you, but there's also a shortcut to the #1, #2, #4, #6, #7, #9, #10, and #13 most popular websites. It's the literal url bar... You can type "!w hacker news" to search wikipedia for hacker news.
Sorry, it is just as laughable to say firefox is shoving Wikipedia down your throat as it is to say they're shoving AI.
> if they decided to randomly cram an opt out LLM into the distro,
Do you realize how big an LLM is? Clearly you don't. The browser isn't going to fit on a lot of people's computers if they shove an LLM in.
And hey, if you feel I'm wrong here go jump on a fork that isn't going to add those things like Mullvad or Waterfox. That's still supporting Firefox in the way of standing against Google while also making a clear signal that you don't want those features. Have your cake and eat it too, but I'm saying "Shut up with the talk that makes people switch to Chrome". We have to be honest with ourselves here. All this outrage at Mozilla for not being pure enough is just driving people to Chrome. That's why I'm calling all this fucking idiotic. It's a literal footgun. But don't listen to me look at what's happened in the past. Look at the comments here. Look at the comments in the past. FFS people were equating Mozilla accepting crypto donations with shipping a miner in the browser. It literally takes place in the Mastadon thread we're all talking about. Those things are wildly different and it is wildly a disingenuous interpretation.
So yeah, I'm going to keep calling this complaining idiotic and counterproductive. We've been grabbing our pitchforks for years every time Mozilla even slightly steps out of line, or even if we think they might! And for years their browser share has been siphoned off to Chrome or some painted up variant. So forgive me if I don't believe your actions align with the goals you claim. And forgive me if I cannot distinguish complaining from criticism, because as I've stated above, your evidence doesn't appear to be what you claim it is. Saying they're shipping LLMs is just as disingenuous as saying they shipped a crypto miner. It is such a grotesque mischaracterization that it is laughable.
>"Shut up with the talk that makes people switch to Chrome".
No this is silly and you should dispense with it. Theres no cow so sacred it cant be criticised.
>Do you realize how big an LLM is? Clearly you don't.
Yes I do, I have run qwen 4b locally.
>The browser isn't going to fit on a lot of people's computers if they shove an LLM in.
The point I was making. Anything down this track is going to cause resource headaches, browsers are already a resource headache.
>We've been grabbing our pitchforks for years every time Mozilla even slightly steps out of line
I have been cool with literally everything else they have done, and even spent time pointing out that the T&C changes were relatively normal practice. Lumping me in with every other criticism you don't like is a genetic fallacy.
>It's a literal footgun.
Its community feedback. They ignore it at their peril.
> But don't listen to me look at what's happened in the past. Look at the comments here. Look at the comments in the past. FFS people were equating Mozilla accepting crypto donations with shipping a miner in the browser. It literally takes place in the Mastadon thread we're all talking about. Those things are wildly different and it is wildly a disingenuous interpretation.
I dont see how you are equating these. My post isn't in the Mastodon thread.
>Saying they're shipping LLMs
You literally quoted my "if", not reading and understanding how that word modifies the language around it is on you.
Theres really 2 states until there's an OS level LLM layer.
1. Shipping a low parameter/ otherwise compressed LLM.
2. LLM features are non local, with all the headaches that entails.
> And hey, if you feel I'm wrong here go jump on a fork that isn't going to add those things like Mullvad or Waterfox
I am required as a matter of employment to use an approved web browser 9-5. We have strict rules against AI use, only permitting copilot with enterprise data protection. (Using copilot without that stupid green tick, and letting customer data into it, is an instant RGE, same with any other LLM)
Another leg of this, is that I have 1000 profiles on 1000 computers for quite a few different customers. The nature of my work does not permit a single profile that roams to every computer I use. I cannot cross the streams between multiple customers.
I am not going to be asked to go to every PC and server, and opt out of AI features. I am likely to be asked to completely remove Firefox as an approved browser, pull it off every machine, and push only Microsoft Edge going forward. Because perversely, it auto signs in to Copilot with EDP via 365, if EDP has been purchased. So it can (sadly) do whatever the fuck it wants.
We are super sensitive to supply chain stuff, so are unlikely to be permitted to use any fork. We recently dismissed an addon for a product that was developed, by one of the core developers of the product, on his own time as an extra feature. Why? The guy didnt spend a lot of time maintaining it and seemed overwhelmed with pull requests. I haven't looked at the Firefox forks, but I know our security posture and its probably a non starter.
Even the idea that an unapproved LLM could scoop up what I am browsing is going to poison the well.
And like I have repeatedly stated, I like firefox. I want to use firefox. Part of the reason I want to use firefox is that it has no LLM instead of the approved LLM that I detest.
Even if Firefox goes "aha, we will implement our service to connect to Copilot with EDP" it would have to do so in a fashion where it is completely seamless, and zero touch, with no failback to regular copilot or another service. I cant conceive of Microsoft being that friendly.
We aren't alone in this. Lots of organisations are making similar decisions. I speak to other service providers going through the same headaches. Our contracts make it our responsibility to actively prevent customer data exfiltration, which is a basic feature and requirement of a lot of LLM implementations. As you stated, the browser LLM will want the browser window context. Microsoft (sadly) understands this, and knows that users will desire path to an LLM if one isn't available, and they understand what words we need written into the service agreement to make EDP attractive. Copilot is terrible, its also perfect for enterprise.
Firefox has over the last few years become a starkly friendly safe haven for privacy focused work. I feel, or at least felt, completely safe performing sensitive work with their product. Work being the keyword in enterprise. Things that become a toy or a risk go away. Chrome use in similar orgs to mine is decreasing for various similar reasons.
I am not sure if you think losing a decent chunk of enterprise users with sensitive requirements is worth it but at least you spent your time defending Firefox from criticism that might have retained those users? And when Firefox is just feature for feature exactly doing what chrome is doing, you might see new users show up for some reason? I don't see that as a winning strategy.
I really don't think they should play the ice cream vendor game at all. Let Edge and Chrome play in that space. Give firefox room to not suck. Let firefox be an actual alternative with significant points of difference not just an also ran.
>> "Shut up with the talk that makes people switch to Chrome".
> No this is silly and you should dispense with it. Theres no cow so sacred it cant be criticised.
You think that just because I'm telling you to not grab your pitchfork that I'm defending Mozilla as infallible?
I don't believe in sacred cows, but unlike you I do not believe there is a cow so profane that it should be vilified at every turn.
> We are super sensitive
All you are doing is teaching Mozilla to ignore you.
If they do bad you get angry. If they do good you get angry because it isn't good enough.
They cannot win! So tell me, why they should listen. Maybe they can do good enough by you but by doing so that won't be good enough by millions of others. And why should they optimize for one person?
Do not conflate my disbelief in demons as a belief in gods. You are confused at who is the religious one here
This is how Firefox fell behind Chrome and bled their entire market share. The strategy of letting Chrome out innovate them and then copy what they think is good is not a strategy that works.
Firefox fell behind Chrome because of aggressive marketing from Google in a way that probably violates some antitrust laws if they were actually being enforced, combined with a couple of own-goals from Mozilla.
Basically Google exploits their market dominance in Search and Mail to get people to use Chrome (and probably their other services too). When you search in a non-Chrome browser, you'll be constantly informed by Google about how much better their search is with Chrome through pop-ups and in-page notifications (not browser notifs). If you click a link in the Gmail app on iOS, rather than opening the browser, you get a Chrome advertisement if they detect it isn't your default browser.
This goes hand-in-hand with Chrome being the default Android browser (don't underestimate the power of being the default) and Mozilla alienating their core audience of power users by forcibly inserting features that those power users despise.
Chrome never won on features, it won on marketing and abuse of a different monopoly.
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
If you want to be a power user, then be a power user. Switch to a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox.
Seriously, I don't get the problem here. I don't want AI in my browser either, but it is pretty simple for us who care to switch away. It's even easy for those who aren't technically skilled!
If this is what stops Firefox from drowning then I'm all for it. They are our last line of defense from a Google controlled internet. What Firefox puts in their browser isn't that critical to me (i.e. doesn't affect me) as long as it stays open source and there are forks. But Firefox dying does! So yeah, I'm gonna root for Firefox even when it does things I don't want because what I care about far more than any specific browser feature is the internet not being controlled by any single entity.
So can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?
By having the most engaged users leave and splinter the community furtehr in hopes that Mozilla out competes the trillion dollar monopoly in a war of data centers? We really will do anything except message your policy makers, huh?
I migrated several times before and am browsing around now. Id even be so bold to say that Mozilla dying will not kill the Quantum web engine scene, so I have no allegiance to rooting for yet another billion dollar corporation that has continually proven that their customers are not their interest. But I don't think "no one cares about you, just leave" is the healthiest option for your stated goals.
>Can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?
This isn't an argument, this is my statement. I don't want my tools to be bloated.
If the entire idea of a web browser collapses overnight, I'll make due. But the last thing I'll be accused of is remaining silent and having this industry bewildered on how this apocalypse came upon them. They got feedback and ignored it, stopped competing on merits over trends, and lost sight of what people actually want. That's their choice, and they will reap what they sow.
> By having the most engaged users leave and splinter the community furtehr
Power users going to a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox still helps Mozilla. Just in the same way that people switching to Brave helps Google.
> We really will do anything except message your policy makers, huh?
I actually do this. And I'm actually decently satisfied with one of them. I bet you're grateful for that person too even if you don't know it.
> I migrated several times before and am browsing around now.
Cool? Switching browsers is literally one of the easiest platform migrations you can do. All your bookmarks and everything transfers. I'd bet something like Mullvad (works with the Tor foundation and their fork of Firefox) is better your speed. Yes, you can uninstall their built-in mullvad VPN extension and it'll just go away.
> But I don't think "no one cares about you, just leave" is the healthiest option for your stated goals.
Yet that's not what's going on
> I don't want my tools to be bloated.
So don't install them?
Seriously, I don't get the problem. As far as I'm aware the only things that are opt-out are the smart tabs. Which is a 22.6MB and 57MB vector embedding models that can be easily removed.
So what bloat?
They said everything will be opt-in and that's cool with me. If they go back on that then yeah, grab the fucking pitchforks and I'll be right there with you because fuck those lying bastards. But so far they haven't done that so put the pitchfork down. All you're doing is being over zealous and attacking the greater enemy's (Chrome) enemy. You don't have to call Firefox your ally but it's pretty clear that Chrome is significantly more misaligned with your wants than Firefox is. So stop attacking the best thing we got right now.
> this industry bewildered on how this apocalypse came upon them
I'm pretty confident this is happening because all the privacy maximalists are not actually privacy maximalists and would rather lick the fucking boot than take a knight who's armor isn't pure. Doesn't matter if that boot is orange and shaped like a lion, it's still the boot.
I'm sorry the choices are slim. I really do wish it was better. But we're never going to get there if we kill the last thing standing against the monopoly. So yeah, pick the right fucking battle.
>I bet you're grateful for that person too even if you don't know it.
I'm grateful for actions, not words. I don't see much action here.
>Seriously, I don't get the problem.
Easy to be blind when you choose not to see. I don't have much to add to neither the llm nor Mozilla debate. We have plenty of literature on the issues with both.
The lack of perfection, and existence of opposition, blinds you to such action.
It isn't words I expect you you be grateful for, it's actions.
While it's far from perfect and far from where I'd personally like things to be, there is progress being made on the privacy and digital rights fronts. We've won the right to repair. We've struck down strong efforts to kill net neutrality. Several states have stronger data rights for their citizens[0]! And we've done much more! It's an uphill battle but that doesn't mean it's one we're losing!
> Easy to be blind when you choose not to see.
You're right!
But I'm not the one making everything black and white. It's good to strive for perfection, but if you're waiting till it's achieved then you'll be waiting for eternity.
Worse, if you're hyper critical at progress towards the world we want then we'll never get there. If you complain when a company does wrong and when a company makes a step in the right direction that's not big enough then why should they ever listen to you? All you've told them is that there's nothing they can do that will make you[1] happy. So why should they listen? Why should they even try?
You play a dangerous game. One we already know how it plays out...
[1] and everyone else like you that is not 100% aligned in your wants. No company can make all of you perfectly happy at the same time because you are not identical people.
I think the core of the issue is that Mozilla is thinking big. They're not happy to service a niche well (which the majority of the comments on Mozilla related posts is generally asking them to), they want to get back to their glory days, capture the mainstream.
And that is tough. Chrome won because it was an, at the time, superior product, AND because it had an insane marketing push. I remember how it was just everywhere. Every other installer pushed Chrome on you, as well as all the Google properties, it was all over the (tech) news, shaping new standards aggressively etc. Not something Mozilla can match.
But they just won't give up. I don't know if I should applaud that or not, but I think it's probably the core of the disconnect between Mozilla and the tech community. They desperately want to break into the mainstream again, their most vocal supporters want them to get a reality check on their ambitions.
If I was running Mozilla, I'd probably go for the niche. It's less glamorous, but servicing a niche is relatively easy, all you have to do is listen to users and focus on stuff they want and/or need. You generally get enough loyalty to be able to move a bit behind the curve, see what works for others first, then do your own version once it's clear how it'll be valuable to the user base. I'd give this strategy the highest chance of long term survival and impact.
Mainstream is way tougher. You kinda need to make all kinds of people with different needs happy enough, and get ahead of where those wants and needs are going.
One could argue they could do both: Serve a niche well with Firefox and try to reach the mainstream with other products. I think to some degree they've tried it, with mixed results.
The mainstream didn't get mainstream by striving to go with mainstream. They got there by serving a niche well and then expanding the niche. Trying to go mainstream without having a niche moat will make you lag behind the establishment endlessly.
I'm not an Apple fan (rather an Apple hater if you would), but they are a perfect example of this. First, have a top quality niche product, then go into the big waters with the vision you got from the niche - and then people will actually be willing to give up bells and whistles the product that is good enough.
Mozilla have a well-established niche with a vision, but they can't monetize without giving up the vision they have (and apparently consider opening for small direct donations or maybe even direct bug/feature crowdsourcing not worth it). So they keep jumping on every sidetrack. And keep losing even the niche they have.
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.
I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.
Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.
On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.
Exploratory yes but when you're still exploring it's not a great idea to bet a whole company on something that might not pan out. Or to dump stuff on users with lots of promotion that may or not be actually useful.
And yeah for accessibiity a lot of this is hugely useful but that's a very niche usecase.
And yes AI-assisted search (or deep research, even better) is also something I like. But it's also because search engines themselves have become so enshittified and promote bad content first.
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
The pattern is that I seek out useful tools. I don't wait for them to be rained down and force fed to me. Just because meat is useful to me doesn't mean I want to be subscribed to a grocery store who will deliver meat every month. That's an overkill of resources for most consumers.
There probably is a big difference between 'do you ever' and 'how often do you'.
I very rarely visit websites that I want translated; so rarely that I can tolerate google translate, or copying and pasting a section of a page into a tab with gemini; so on its own, this feature wouldn't sell me a browser. Besides, as a sibling comment says, even the current non-AI-enhanced browsers offer, sometimes too intrusively, to translate a page in a non-matching language. At least Chrome does this to me.
Your second scenario happens much more frequently; but again, it is so frictionless to type the term or a phrase in a search box in another tab that I never find myself wishing for a dedicated panel in the browser that could do this for me.
Your third scenario, for me, is finding something in api docs. Like, what's that command again to git cherry-pick a range of commits? So far, just googling this stuff or asking copilot / gemini in a separate tab has always worked. I am not sure I would be upset at a browser that didn't have an inbuilt tool for doing this.
What I do want from a web browser is evergreenness, the quickest and fullest adoption of all the web specs, and great web developer tools.
> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.
> the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install
What's this even mean?
There's no fucking way there's going to be a "full LLM integrated into every browser." You really think they're going to drop in a 20GB-200GB model with every browser? Mind you, Llama-8B is over 15GB.
Nah. So far they are doing about 50MB per language translation that you ask for[0]. You have to explicitly install languages to translate.
There's neither "a full blown LLM" (whatever that means) nor forcing AI onto you. You still have to download the language packs, they are just offering an extension that more seamlessly integrates with the browser.
And we know what they're building too! Go look in the "Labs" tab and you'll see an opt-in for testing a semantic search of your history. That doesn't take an LLM to do, that takes a vector embedding model. What next? Semantic search in page? How terrible of a feature! (But seriously, can we get regex search?)
"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone
and then get something that I can understand enough to say
I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?
And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in
When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?
>Starting today, Google Translate uses advanced Gemini capabilities to better improve translations on phrases with more nuanced meanings like idioms, local expressions or slang.
> most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
Which seems to be the problem. People don't even realize they're being irrational, despite Mozilla being quite transparent about what they're doing. It's pretty clear.
I mean a Firefox download is 150MB, not 16GB...
Plus, we know what Firefox is looking to do. In their labs tab they let you opt into trying out semantic search of your history. So that's a vector embedding model, not an LLM.
Edit:
Okay, they have "Shake to summarize". But that's a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. Nothing shipped with the browser. Similarly I don't understand how the chatbot window is so controversial. I̶'̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶but are people really pressing <C-x> on a mac or ctrl+alt+x on linux/windows? It's not a LLM shipped with the browser, it is just a window split ("shortcut") to literally one of the most popular websites on the internet right now (ChatGPT is literally the #5 most visited website and you all think AI is unpopular?!). Adding shortcuts isn't shoving AI down your throat. Are they shoving Wikipedia down your throat because you can do "!w hacker news"? Give me a break guys
AI is a broad term going back to 1955. It covers many different techniques, algorithms, and topics. The first AI chess programs (DeepBlue, et. al.) were using tree search algorithms like alpha-beta pruning that are/were classified as AI techniques.
Machine translation is a research topic in AI because translating from one language to another is something humans are good at while computers are not traditionally.
More recently, the machine learning (ML) branch of AI has become synonymous with AI as have the various image models and LLMs built on different ML architectures.
Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
"See but what if instead of ctrl+F, we fired up a nvdia gpu in a data center instead .... "
I'll pass. Also for people that already know another language, the auto translate is annoying, inaccurate, and strips all of the humanity out of the writing.
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."
I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.
Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...
Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
Crypto is going to be a new settlement layer thats it. You'll use stripe and they will settle it on their public chain. You are free to use the chain directly but no real consumer is going to do that.
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
Comparing LLMs to NFT isn't fair. Being able to talk to you computer and have it understand you and even do the things you ask is literally StarTrek technology.
I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.
>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
But not just other web pages, other apps too. So again, why a browser. Why ask firefoxs pop out expansion panel instead of a right click context menu in word, or a chat interface in copilots phat app or a website chat interface or the precious space under a google search or any of the other 10000 places people are inserting this shit.
And a copy paste task isnt necessarily going to be aided by a pop out sidebar running a local LLM chewing up already precious RAM. There's no guarantee its going to integrate correctly with the users chosen LLM provider.
Like we are looking at having LLM's inserted into almost every customer facing application. At some point, they will want a subscription for each of them or they are all going to need local resources. They are all going to have to be interoperable and run off the same account. Or you are going to have to have something that just works with the whole stack.
It doesn't make a lick of sense to try and preempt that situation, with mainline features pushed to all customers.
Googles approach, having a separate AI enabled browser makes the most sense. If it takes off its because of affirmative user consent and they can merge it into chrome. If it doesn't work they can silently discontinue it like so many other things.
Google has a separate browser for AI features? Gemini has just shown up in Chrome for me.
It’s of course a mess and a mad rush for market share right now. That’s just a product of a healthy, competitive market. I agree that I’d rather have one AI service I pay for that integrates with all my apps.
AI integration in apps is about being able to feed in the context from the app into the model, like the web page or document. It’s much nicer to just ask the model about what you’re looking at directly rather than having to copy in context. I don’t have market research on this, but I do believe customers will expect it.
Someday hopefully the OS will allow apps to expose context and actions for a systemwide AI assistant. This is what Apple is trying to do with their Apple Intelligence for instance. If this works well, that’d be great.
Considering pirating the whole internet and boiling the planet is required to summarize a single page in a mediocre manner, it’s understandable that people who knows how the sausages are made are against it.
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
The FUD is the implications of making it opt out, with reports that there's already other features that requires changing the settings/flags in order to "opt out".
I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
Lots of disagreement, but from necessity I (sort of) agree. Firefox foremost needs users. If it takes AI features to get them, so be it. However, Firefox cannot afford to lose its loyal user base, so they have to be optional.
Honestly if it were up to me, yes I'd love Firefox to stay in the niche, but they have to follow the market if they want to stay relevant. I just hope they can push more adoption.
I am highly sceptical of all AI features and it seems Gardner and other cyber security experts are starting to wake up as well:
The programs let you outsource and automate tasks, such as online searches or writing an email, to an AI agent. The only problem is that these same AI capabilities can be tricked into executing malicious commands hidden in websites or emails, effectively turning the browser against the user.
For now this is restricted to Perplexity Comet and OpenAI Atlas and only the UK has issued an official warning, but why would I, personally, want my Firefox browser with an opt-out risk instead of an opt-in?
Yeah, that's like having a browser without without support for blockchain, semantic web or UML! No one would use it without these absolutely critical features!
I'm surprised your take is so controversial. This really is it - yes, the current core users are not interested in AI but most people in our lives who are not techies do use them, and Firefox needs win these users if it wants to stay relevant.
Of course, I have opinions on other ways it could make money instead of jumping on the latest hot thing (pocket, fakespot, VPN, etc) without actually truly building the ecosystem but at least they are trying.
I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
>Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
but.. why? I can read the website myself. That's why I'm on the website.
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
Time will tell, but right now we're not solving the problem of running LLMs by increasing efficiency, we're solving it by massive, unprecedented investments in compute power and just power. Companies definitely weren't building nuclear power stations to power their spell checkers or even 3D renderers. LLMs are unprecedented in this way.
True, but the usefulness of local models is actually getting better. I hope that the current unprecedented madness is a factor of the potential of cloud models, and not a dismissal of the possibility of local models. It's the biggest swing we've seen (with the possible exception of cloud computing vs local virtualisation) but that may be due to recognition of the previous market behaviour, and a desperate need to not miss out on the current boom.
Also it does mean something. An NPU is completely different from your 5070. Yes the 5070 has specific AI cores but it also has raster cores and other things not present in an NPU.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
And all of that is irrelevant for the AI use case. The NPU is at best slightly more efficient than a GPU for this use case, and mostly its just cheaper by forgoing various parts of a GPU that are not useful for AI (and would not be used during inferencing anyway).
And the examples being given of why you'd want AI in your browser are all general text comprehension and conversational discussions about that text, applied to whatever I may be browsing. It doesn't really get less specialized than that.
Personally, I don't need AI in my browser at all. But if I did, why would I want to run a crappy model that can't think and hallucinates constantly, instead of using a better model that kinda thinks and doesn't hallucinate quite as often?
I generally agree with you, but you'd be surprised at what lower parameter models can accomplish.
I've got Nemo 3 running on an iGPU on a shitty laptop with SO-DIMM memory, and it's good enough for my tasks that I have no use for cloud models.
Similarly, Granite 4 based models are even smaller, just a couple of gigabytes and are capable of automation tasks, summarization, translation, research etc someone might want in a browser.
Both do chain of reasoning / "thinking", both are fast, and once NPU support lands in runtimes, they can be offloaded on to more efficient hardware.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least in my experience, fuzzy accuracy / stochastic inaccuracy is good enough for some tasks.
That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.
You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
No, I'm not "fully converted." I reject the notion that you have to join one cult or the other when it comes to this stuff.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
> I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
And here you get back to my original point: to get good (or at least better) AI, you need complex and huge models, that can't realistically run locally.
You can just look down thread at what people actually expect to do - certainly not (just) text summarization. And even for summarization, if you want it to work for any web page (history blog, cooking description, github project, math paper, quantum computing breakthrough), and you want it accurate, you will certainly need way more than Ollama 8B. Add local image processing (since huge amounts of content are not understandable or summarizable if you can't understand images used in the content), and you'll see that for a real 99% solution you need models that will not run locally even in very wild dreams.
Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?
For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
> The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN"
I've already hit that option before reading the other ones.
> "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title"
Why would you bother fetching the clickbait at all? It's spam.
The main transformation I want out of a browser, the absolutely critical one, is the removal of advertising. I concede that AI might be decent at removing ads and all the overlay clutter that makes news sites unreadable; does anyone have the demo of "AI readability mode"? Crucially I do not want it changing any non-ad text found on the page.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I like Firefox and don't think it's about to collapse like many users here, but I have already unchecked "Recommend features as you browse" and "Recommend extensions as you browse" along with setting the welcome page for updates to about:blank.
Ideally the user interface for any tool I use should never change unless I actively prompt it to change, and the only notifications I should get would be from my friends and family contacting me or calendars/alarms that I set myself.
Most users are entirely ignorant of privacy and security and will make choices without considering it. I don’t say that to excuse it but it’s absolutely the reality.
I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
haha, what if I told you that the currently existing, shipping product, "ChatGPT / Gemini uses a browser for you" will have more users than Firefox in two years? I will even bet you that will likely be the case in 2 months.
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.
That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
Just so everyone else knows, the complaining is by definition reactionary.
> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.
> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.
Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.
Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).
Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?
Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.
I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.
before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.
I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
I'm glad to see some mozilla employees standing their base in the comments. That guy trying to make the point that Mozilla was wasting resources chasing trend only for an employee to say it was a few people checking it out while 1000 people continued work on the normal stuff is nice to see.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
This feels less like an “anti-AI” stance and more like a trust and control issue.
For browsers especially, users have very different threat models and performance expectations, and “always on” AI features blur that line quickly.
An explicit opt-out makes sense, but I wonder if the more important question is whether these features can be implemented in a way that’s truly local and auditable.
If users can’t clearly understand where data goes and what runs on-device, toggles become a necessary safety valve rather than a preference.
I haven't paid close attention, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla has mostly invested in local AI for tasks such as translation, summarization, and organization. As long as that's the case, I don't see any particular safety or privacy risks; if it works without an Internet connection, it's probably OK.
Are you sure? I see a huge spike in CPU when I long-click on a link to see the preview and summary. This is the newest summarization feature, not the older one with the chatbot on the side.
This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern.
If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable.
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)
> if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
I've been really confused as to what all the hubub is about. I think I saw the sidebar for about 4 seconds on each of my installs before I hid it forever. I tried to reenable it to see what people were complaining about but couldn't find it within 10 seconds so gave up.
They said they'll create a Bigger Red Switch (TM), so this interim solution is better than nothing, and it's going to get better.
If they're breaking their usual silence to talk about it on Mastodon via an employee/developer, they should better keep their word, because they're on a razor's edge there, and they'll be cut pretty badly if they slip on this one.
Firefox should release a separate build - "base", "core", "classic" - clearly, I am not a marketing person, but idea behind it, that this is only a browser without any extra features added. No "AI", no studies, no account sync. Only bare minimum browser, that allows user to do their internet things and, if they ever desire, will install all extra bells and whistles as extensions. No need to agree to any EULA either (remember, that it was added to Firefox?). And, the best part, all existing users will still keep using the same old Firefox version, no surprises for them. Now, I assume that someone will tell me, that this version already exists and is called ESR :)
That's silly. It's still entirely possible as there are plenty of great extensions that don't require XUL and Firefox, which is still almost entirely XUL, can be hacked on locally to reduce surfaced features all the way down to a window with an addressbar and nothing else by examining that XUL and using userChrome.css to alter it.
I'm pretty sure ESR is a different thing, but yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think it even should be relatively easy, insofar as that a lot of the non-base functionality is in built-in extensions?
Average Joe or Joan will install some crap AI assisted browser if some idiot in Tiktok or FB says follow me and I will DM you a special link to get baby-clothes for -10% discount. Hope your family is not that. My spouse despite reading HN etc thinks that anyway privacy is lost - so why notget at least that 10% discount.
Another problem for Mozilla:
- If they don't pivot to AI people will leave it. Yes, some hardcore RMS fans will use some clone of Firefox - all others will not
- If they adopt modern AI people scream
- Same happened when Mozilla accepted DRM (for Netflix etc). Many tech writers, commentators were against that. But if Firefox did not adopt it then all those tech writers would have used Chrome to see Netflix. No one of these commentators say they will boycott Netflix.
Forcing everything into a plug-in is architecturally more complex, and less performant... I'm imagining proxying from native code through JavaScript APIs, then back to native code for LLM operations and context storage. But might lead to creation of some new AI extension APIs.
So now we're debating compile-time feature flags vs run-time, and the overhead of running/maintaining multiple build configs. And picking good names for each... "Firefox Pro with AI" vs "Firefox Lite for Engineers". This isn't what Mozilla needs to be focusing on right now, imo.
Is it using AI if you don't click on the feature's related button? AFAIK when I choose to translate a page or a selection it only starts working when I do it.
Sync is the only feature you listed which is arguably a core feature, in that it makes sense to build into the browser to be able to sync as much of the browser's settings and data as possible for the user. Everything else --- Hello, Pocket, and LLMs --- can and should sink or swim as extensions which the user must seek out and install if they provide sufficient value.
You won't find much relating to Pocket or Hello in the OSS project. I predict a lot of the new AI functionality will stay out too. So not core functionality.
Normal users will be fine if they will see two big squares side by side as an installation step: „with AI“ and „without AI“, where the former will just install and enable the plugin. Explicit choice is better than opt-out, and it’s not going to be something people frequently change their mind about, so another switch can be buried in settings.
Was actually looking for somebody mentioning this bit. Admittedly, one of the few regular Firefox users. Yet, as a regular Firefox user, this much ranting about something that can be turned off with a click, is kind of annoying. The stuff that's been added so far ("Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points", "Solo AI Website Creator", "Sidebar AI chatbot") is incredibly easy to disable. Been in advanced, beta, dev releases for a while.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.
Potential users are not users, and firefox can't be that browser. Actually that browser is brave, and it also doesn't have hundred of millions of users. You can't fight defaults browsers, people don't care.
I don't get this dark/pessimistic/Firefox's so done view many people love to harp. Do we want Firefox to return, or to die? We should decide and act accordingly.
Telling Firefox to not to move and get out of the place where it currently is a great contradiction in itself.
Many potential Chrome users were not users, and now they are. You can change public opinion by putting your money where your mouth is, and being persistent about it.
Also, let's not forget that Firefox is kinda preventing itself being detected via standard mechanisms so global analytics show its numbers a bit low than the reality, as well.
Many potential Chrome users were not users, and then android happened. I'll believe firefox has a shot to become mainstream when they do something similar. Until them, keep your users or alienate them and disappear.
People are already getting worked up about being prompted to opt into a new feature on update (even if that prompt is hidden behind an icon that doesn't do anything until the user clicks it), so it's not inconceivable that the kill switch just disables those opt-in prompts for AI-related features.
I guess that just means that there will be a number of AI related features you can choose to select but if at some point you want it all gone you just hit the checkmark Disable all AI.
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
I still don't want to use an "AI browser". I don't want to use a browser where all or most development effort goes into "AI features" that I need to disable. I want a browser where the development effort goes into making it better at browsing the web.
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
> Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
Look, it's pretty simple: A bunch of companies have been shoving AI into their products without a lot of consideration for what their users actually want and need. This is a signal for current and future actions that are user-hostile, both directly involving AI and in general (indicative of their current mentality).
"Open source" doesn't help when it's a huge project and users aren't actively auditing all of the changes. (And in general we want to trust the developers; if you're having to audit all features, trust has already been lost.)
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
Local translation of websites so you don't have to tell Google about all the sites you want to read that are not in your language. Firefox's address bar that learns what you type most often and moves those items higher in the autocomplete list. There are plenty of great cases for AI very tightly integrated in the browser. That you haven't thought very hard about it or even bothered to see what AI Firefox has already had for ages (Awesomebar was about 15 years ago) is precisely why you don't "get it."
Is it just as easy to make an extension that runs a local AI translation model? Translation would benefit from having a community continuously updating and tuning local models for languages.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.
I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
If they want to position themselves with a point of difference from competitors, they could provide a settings list of AI features with check boxes for each.
This would tap into the insight that not everyone dislikes the same AI features. For many AI isn't a dirty word, but rather they've seen plenty of examples where it's simply annoying or over-taxing resources.
For example some like AI to build a quick reference summary from a set of web results, but don’t want a full agenic-style AI to extend beyond that.
This could potentially entice users not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and maybe even make a few converts.
I think Firefox is an excellent browser. Their problem is simply that they have too much revenue for too many years. They need a fraction of that. If I were the ceo, I would drastically cut back operations. Scale down the org to 10% of its current strength, keep shipping a solid and boring browser, accept donations that directly support development of the browser. No fads, no ai, just a high performance, bug free, standards compliant browser. The users and donations will come. Firefox will survive.
One year of google revenue can kar them for 10 years of lean operation!
Revenue is good for the company - and they'll want as much as possible in order to support their obligations to the business plan, but unfortunately layoffs were still part of that plan these past few years. Mozilla's CEO pay:
2018: $2.46 million
2020: $2.97 million
2021: $5.59 million
2022: $6.90 million
2023: $6.26 million
I block requests to Mozilla infrastructure, not by mistake.
Internet economy already made a full circle with this once before: at first, ads existed to sell things online for advertisers, and make money for publishers (also as a machine for circular deals to propel stock valuations, during the dotcom boom). Then they became so pervasive and annoying that eventually they just became a method of making user experience worse, and get paid for ad-free, thus making money. Today, no one cares about performance of those ads, they are just a replacement of "nag screens" of the shareware era.
It sounds like AI will made this circle a lot faster.
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism
- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform
2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features
- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes
- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones
- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.
3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras
- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.
- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.
- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe
- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services
- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux
- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management
4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots
- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons
- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape
5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
This would be useful for many people who want to avoid AI features being forced on them by every piece of software imaginable. Hopefully, a centralized kill switch like this will also make it easy for Firefox forks such as Zen and Floorp to let users enable AI features if they want to without changing about:flags.
This was made clear when they talked about this previously but once again people don't want to hear that and instead want to rant about AI. The only thing stopping Firefox is its own users.
i don't even want the code present on my machine, only being held back by a checkbox that may or may not be correctly respected. this is what extensions we invented for.
its funny how multi-account containers is a such a killer feature of firefox (that none of the other browsers are able to implement, as far as i remember) but its kept as an extension and they never seem too bothered about promoting it either
Wait, what? Vivaldi is open source? Now I am confused and really not sure what was the reason I ignored it for so long. Was there something iffy with Linux desktop integration?
Quite surprised at Vivaldi. Considered that as Opera spiritual successor including any possible feature, will've been one of the first browsers adding AI.
When a company has monopolistic practices, its products ride their anticompetiveness to majority market share by force of their dominance. The result is the Netscapeification of anything that competes with any monopoly. A monopoly anticompetitiveness needs to be dealt with powerfully by Congress to increase competition. Though the lobbyists of these anticompetitive companies and the billions deployed from the lobbying companies effectively is a significant detriment to competitors, healthy competition, and always in many subtle, loss of innovation ways, the consumer. This is the tip of the iceberg for anyone in competition to the oligarchical status quo that is in effect, and detrimenting the consumer in multitude ways that you are not comprehending.
When a company has monopolistic practices, its products ride their anticompetiveness to majority market share by force of their dominance. The result is the Netscapeification of anything that competes with any monopoly. A monopoly anticompetitiveness needs to be dealt with powerfully by Congress to increase competition. Though the lobbyists of these anticompetitive companies and the billions deployed from the lobbying companies effectively is a significant detriment to competitors, healthy competition, and always in many subtle, loss of innovation ways, the consumer. This is the tip of the iceberg for anyone in competition to the oligarchical status quo that is in effect, and detrimenting the consumer in multitude ways that you are not comprehending.
> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
I love threads about Mozilla. New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Mozilla has a recurring problem with being unable to provide the simple, obvious right answer.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I use Firefox on Android perhaps entirely because it supports uBlock Origin and my other extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
On a different tack, I feel like I went out of my way to use Firefox (and Firefox Focus) on iOS and was thankful they had them during a time where everything had to use the safari renderer. IIRC Firefox Focus even had an ad-block extension that worked on safari
Historically yes, but in some areas like the EU there have been some regulation changes in 2024 where theoretically there could be alternate browser engines on iOS but in practice it hasn't happened yet. See https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.
I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
Always appreciate people citing real data! I honestly would not have been able to guess one way or the other but unfortunately most comments are kind of hip firing in random directions that are impossible to keep track of, so it helps to keep these discussions grounded.
I you can’t take the time to install a new tool. You don’t need it. And I think that’s a great mindset to have with not just software, but when approaching life.
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
> Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
I can put up with a lot of friction and cruft as long as the foundations are solid amd I feel a product is moving in the right direction. I moved off chrome when it became crystal clear that Chrome was not even pretending to compete on User experience anymore, even in it is still the best browser in some regards.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
There is a difference between "FYI, we're rejecting a ton of money for us, that's how serious we are about not selling out" and "We ran the numbers, and on balance, taking these 30% more money doesn't seem like the right thing to do because it would be against our stated mission statement".
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.
Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance.
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
I am fine with it being a disable-button, as long it's persistent once set.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
When you have a position in the project called "CEO" and that person has the ability to hand down edicts of what he or she sees the project as being, that's when you get into trouble, especially in free software. We've seen this way of developing software co-opted by major companies who have turned otherwise good projects - Chromium and AOSP immediately come to mind - into vendor lock-in and spyware by some suit who has been told he needs to create value.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
>Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
This seems like a cultural mismatch more than anything. Mozilla makes software that human people use and human people use normal language rather than avoiding the non-profitable aggravation associated with emotive language that a company employee might be used to.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
It's not a good point. One year from now, every browser is going to be an "AI browser". If Firefox will make it harder to use features that are expected of every browser, it will lose. This is akin to saying that JavaScript should be opt-in. If you want to disable these things, you're clearly a power user, and you should at least be comfortable with clicking "Edit" and then "Settings".
The anti-AI people think they are in the majority. They could be, but I suspect that's not the case. I would be surprised if many in the anti-AI crowd could even point to the specific features of the devices and software they use daily that fall under the "AI" umbrella. Meanwhile, regular people are increasingly turning to chatbots instead of search engines. It seems clear we are at peak hype, but this stuff is here to stay.
Have they come out and said what personal data they are selling yet? They were awfully guarded about what they were selling and to who.
I guess we shouldn't worry though, just some random law thought that what they were doing was "selling personal data" but we shouldn't think that it was. No further explanation required.
It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.
I agree, but there's nothing more frustrating than another niche user group imagining that the reason for this failure is Mozilla lacking to address their obscure requests, while Mozilla's real goal is to create a browser for everyone. The truth is that this goal is borderline impossible, and all these double standards (can't count the times I've heard "I'm tired of Firefox, moving to Chrome!") surely aren't helping.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome
Citation for what really? That the anti-AI movement is a minority? Just ask around you "have you used AI today?" and I'm pretty sure you'll see what I mean. I don't have a horse in this game and I'm not an AI fan, but the numbers speak for themselves so much that the mere question is odd.
The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.
We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it.
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
What about it? If it's output is generated by the manipulation of tensors and weights, it doesn't belong in my browser. It's not there to because I need to browse, it's there because I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me. I could feed those network responses right into a separate, non-browser app and have it translate stuff for me, if I wanted. Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
> Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses. It really is that easy.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
> lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses.
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
Can we please stop calling LLMs "AI"? It's obvious now that there is no intelligence here and no trying to make it talk to itself and call is "reasoning" is not the answer.
Nope, it's too late. It sounded stupid when they called it AI in the start, but now AI means something like "tools that can perform tasks that typically requires human faculties to complete". Just like a computer does more than compute, words change meaning, sometimes influenced by marketing.
what i hate most about this (and the discussion happening in the comments), is that nobody is even defining "AI". "artificial intelligence" is not a technical term. what is mozzila doing exactly? what does it mean to put AI in the browser?
There is kind of software that is created using techniques very different from the techniques used to create the vast majority of socioeconomically-important software until about 4 years ago. We need a name for this thing that definitely exists in reality and definitely differs from software created the traditional way. That name is AI. We're probably going to keep on calling it that even if lots of people protest that having "intelligence" in the name is misleading or erroneous.
I don't understand why it's so difficult (impossible?) with Firefox to use your own private AI server (that's not running on localhost). With Brave it's pretty easy.
The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry
I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
And yea, having a faint through about removing adblock support, yet alone speaking it aloud is a really bad sign for Mozilla's future.
I am waiting for a serious fork of Mozilla to emerge at this point that pays the maintainers better in a bid to overtake Mozilla itself. People would donate to get a better browser, people dont donate because Mozilla wastes all their donor funds on nonsense.
I kind of gave up hope tbh. I still use Firefox but I am waiting for ladybug. It will probably take a couple of years to get there, but it’s what I would have wanted Firefox to be.
There are those. I pay to support Floorp.
But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.
I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously.
Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
It’s Firefox fork being developed by a bunch of Japanese students.
They do good work. I can forgive them for not being the best at naming things in English.
I "forgive" them too, I have no animosity towards them and wish them the best. I just think that the name communicates a lack of seriousness. That's not a criticism, I have plenty of non-serious projects
Kind of agree, needs a better name. It sounds like the name of a social media platform.
Unless you purchased some service from them, you didn't donate to Firefox, because that's a Mozilla Corporation project. Donating to Mozilla Foundation funds their initiatives, but not Firefox.
To Thunderbird, however, we can actually donate to.
At one point, paying for Mozilla's mullvad rebadge would give money to the corp. If you were already going to pay for a VPN, then it's effectively a donation.
Though, just because money goes to the corp, doesn't mean it will contribute to Firefox' development either.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works.
And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic.
> Give us more extensibility instead.
True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL.
> Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more.
Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
> There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?
> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
Yes and that's a good thing
> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?
It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
> Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed.
Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.
AFAIR Mozilla is firmly against introducing new stuff that could be used for fingerprinting and that was their (and Apple's) rationale for not implementing it. That's a noble goal for sure, but peripheral access is a genuinely useful feature now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. You don't like JS having access to everything - fine, but than we need some other way to do this (without porting everything to native).
> now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform.
I feel like we can continue to resist this, although I admit it's getting more and more futile every year. It's like trying to hold back the tide. I personally don't want the web to be an application platform. The web is for browsing web pages. I have an application platform on my computer already.
I see your point. But there is an objective need for a some common ground to applications on. Something with zero install friction and proper sandbox isolation.
Because the alternative isn't "yes, we are providing Linux and MacOS-arm64 binaries", the alternative is "here is your Win32 blob that is broken on wine because screw you that's why" or "here is a .jar with a horrible awt fronts that is also broken unless you run it under an ancient JRT" - and that's on user's side, on developer's side it's even worse. I feel that web becoming an application platform was net negative for the web, but positive for every other platform (and users and developers as well). Yes, it makes web crappy, but we need some crappy platform where all the crap goes - and at least the browser contains the crap well.
> I feel like we can continue to resist this
Or we can accept it, make a good access control system in an app platform for once, and add the few missing parts that the web standards are still missing so it becomes a good platform.
And none of that requires that we give up on an entire facade focused on reading text.
But if Mozilla focus on resisting, they can't do that, and honestly, nobody else out there will.
It's stuff that obviously should not be in the web, that is Google EEEing the web...
Can't you install an extension that will connect to localhost where you can run anything?
docs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
> and not really that harmful in itself
Unless you can't afford the split focus. If Mozilla can do 1 thing right or 2 things half-assed, and it looks like this is the case, they should stop and focus on strengthening the core before hanging more stuff around it.
They have enough money to split their focus, sugar daddy Google is providing it.
I didn't mean it just in terms of money. We can see they don't have the ability to deliver on both fronts so maybe start with one, the more important core of the browser.
I dunno, clearly not.
I keep trying to use it. vs chrome:
1 - bad at returning memory to the OS; do they expect you to regularly restart the whole browser?
2 - shit at managing cpu usage: I'll regularly find the browser sitting at 20-100% cpu load doing nothing. Chrome handles this like a champ;
3 - it recently lost some bookmarks so hard I had to pull them from backup.
They clearly are not capable of splitting their focus.
> [Mozilla always jumped on fads], everyone does.
If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread, Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them, invested minimal resources in others (accepting donations in crypto), and modest resources in VR (which you'd expect given the browser-VR integration standards forming).
So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
> If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Yeah, I'm not searching 500 posts for this..
> Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread
Who is Christophe Henry? Is this some namecalling?
> Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them,
That doesn't make it better, being somewhat selective is also normal. Most companies don't have the resources to follow literally every fad.
> So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
That's the point. Communication of Mozilla is so awful, their whole public picture is how wasteful they are with money, throwing it at pointless dead on arrival-projects. Here are two lists with them [1], [2], this is not a small number of failed projects. They are not even including the small changes in the browser itself.
[1] https://www.spacebar.news/the-mozilla-graveyard/ [2] https://killedbymozilla.com/
The link goes to a conversation on Mastodon.social, and one of the first commenters is called Christophe Henry.
It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox.
Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.
Every browser developer should be forced to take an annual pilgrimage to this gravestone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)
1. Take normal browser
2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively"
3. ???
4. Profit!
5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS.
1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail
- domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com
- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism
- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform
2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features
- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes
- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones
- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.
3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras
- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.
- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.
- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe
- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services
- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux
- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management
4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots
- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons
- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape
5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
It's funny how you post this comment under a comment that says no to all but 2.1 and 2.2.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
Steps 2 and 1 should probably be swapped, but I wouldn't say the rest of what I listed are fads, but what they'd need to become a real and complete alternative to the current ecosystems.
Just a silly idea anyway.
Did you miss Thunderbird Pro?
https://www.tb.pro
Ok so walk me through how _only_ focusing on the browser core will make them money other than continuing to be dependent on Google. How can they diversify their revenue streams?
I agree they should make the browser core good, but right now they are entirely dependent on their biggest competitor.
Falling behind on the browser core makes users leave Firefox because the one non-negotiable requirement users have is that the browser works on the websites they need it to work on. Literally nothing else Mozilla tries to do to diversify their revenue streams will matter if the browser they're trying to build it on top of is not sound and functional.
If they weren't slipping on the core browser as much as they have been, there wouldn't be nearly as many shouts as there are today when they instead spend resources on chasing the latest fad.
- Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox).
- Start crowdfunding for features.
- Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech.
- Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech.
None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have?
- Their engineering team? Maybe.
- The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem).
- Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular.
Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point.
The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.
A summarizer built into the browser can be nice. To monetize add a feature to summarize OpenDocument and pdf files.
> - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). > > - Start crowdfunding for features.
Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well).
I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work.
If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.
> There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those.
And it's fine if they want to compete in that space, but they don't even seem to have the drive or desire to excel there.
To this day, I'm surprised that chromium powers electron and firefox hasn't released a compelling alternative.
> people screaming "but AI is the future"
I witnes far more people screaming against AI.
The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now.
Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments.
I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI.
Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something.
> Mozilla keeps jumping on fads
Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.
> I witnes far more people screaming against AI.
If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it.
If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that.
But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"
"AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet.
I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.
I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.
People tend to complain about stuff that's annoying and broken and just ignore things that work well.
Like Chrome uses AI to translate language and everyone just takes it for granted.
If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.
There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.
On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.
Nothing prevents the prevailing trends from being utterly stupid. Just the opposite, really.
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?
Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.
And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.
And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.
But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.
Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI
I wonder what that might mean!
I just force quit Firefox because it was slowing the macbook with loads of memory use for nothing much running. On with Chrome... They should that sort of thing?
I have not really ever had this issue, and I use Firefox Developer Edition on an M2 Macbook Pro every work day.
I have it too. If you leave firefox running for weeks at a go, it is really bad at returning memory to the OS. m3.
Ah - maybe my extensions or something.
How is this not laughable?
Now we're seeing a similar thing. Everyone is talking about fucking LLMs. What, do you think FF is going to start shipping a 100GB browser? Even Llama-8B is >15GB. That would be ridiculous!
No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search. Seriously, go to their Labs tab! They let you opt in to try a feature to semantically search your browser history. That's not an LLM, that's a vector embedding model! What are they going to do next? Semantic search of a webpage? Regex search?! Even in their announcement the other day they mention the iOS "shake to summarize" and that's not even an AI they're shipping it's just a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. The only other thing they've announced is what already exists, a shortcut to use your chatbot of choice. That's not AI in the browser it is literally a split window.
Don't be so fucking disingenuous.They said literally the opposite[1]
That's not even a quote from him, that's a summarization of their conversation and it literally says that removing ad blockers is against their mission.Literally the opposite of what you're suggestion.
Sorry, people just want to hate on Firefox.
Look, if anyone wants to be a power user there's nothing Firefox is doing from stopping them from using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet? How fucking stupid are we? We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold? It's just laughable at how much we love shooting ourselves in the foot here. We've been playing this same stupid fucking game for years and watching Chrome take more and more market share. Let FF be the browser for the masses and use a fucking fork if you care about true Scottsmen. It takes literally no technical skill to click download on a different webpage. Seriously, this is so fucking dumb.
I'm just going to link this from further down the main post. The two toots summarize it well[2]
[0] You literally have to download the translation models!
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/t...)
[2] https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741...
I agree that the forks are the pressure release valves here. Would strongly consider switching to a fork myself.
But still I'm just wrenched by the dissonance in what new-CEO-guy said. 5 years ago or so I reported a serious bug in pointer events. If you move the mouse less than 1px the browser 5-10% of the time Firefox reports to JS that the you moved the cursor ~400pixels up and to the right or left.
Honestly this bug isn't super high impact for the web as a whole, but anyone who uses pointer events needs to work around it by smoothing the input stream. They confirmed the bug in their tracker and there it has sat for five years with no activity while the browser behaves in violation of the contract between the user and the web platform, putting an extra stumbling block in the way of every web application that allows drawing on screen with the mouse cursor.
To me, an issue like that is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dead. There's only a few reasons I can think of to leave a perfectly-reproduceable issue like that sitting for five years: 1) you don't have the energy for it, probably because so many other things are on fire 2) you don't see any value in having the trust of your users. or 3) your code is so fucked up inside that there's just no hope of figuring out why a half-pixel movement triggers a mouse would do something insane like trigger a mouse event 400 pixels away.
So now this new CEO guy comes along and says "we've lost people's trust." Wow, I think to myself, he really gets it!" Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?
Did you not literally just say you recognized that you had lost people's trust? Did you think that people didn't trust you because you hadn't tasked every engineer that wants to be able to get a promotion to work on AI!?
Did you even look at what they're calling "AI Mode" in that link? They call it "AI Window". It's the same fucking thing as the window where you can opt in to using chatbots. That's nowhere near the same thing as pushing AI on us
See the document the new CEO linked to in his introductory blog post, which I will also link here: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
This is not a shortcut to ChatGPT. They're totally shifting directions, trying to pivot to being an AI company.
> using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
The thing is most of the forks are still using some/all of the on device ML models, they're just not advertising them as AI. From Waterfoxs announcement of "Not using AI*"
>The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither.
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...
Zen:
> Based on Firefox, Zen also inherit its translation features
https://docs.zen-browser.app/user-manual/translate
> people just want to hate on Firefox
While that may describe a few people, I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.
I want to love on Firefox. I've been using it since before it was "Firefox." I've championed it among co-workers and friends tirelessly. But over time, Firefox has become more and more unlovable, getting softer on privacy, altering settings in updates, foisting 'experiments' off on us, and now this AI nonsense.
I'm part of a large makerspace and have watched their market share dwindle among the nerds. Virtually no one is left.
Again, FF added shortcuts to the 5th most popular site in the world. So what. They also have shortcuts to Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites with their bangs. The split window for the chatbot sites? That's barely any bloat and you're not forced to use that. Nor is it even close to shipping you an LLM.
And the translate is completely opt-in. You have to fucking download the translations! They also aren't LLMs. They're like 50MB lol. But they're opt-in!
The Mr Robot thing? Hell yeah I was pissed about that. And that's a legitimate reason to be pissed. But have they tried that again? If they learned they learned and let's move on (even with extra caution).But if we're grabbing pitchforks for fiction then why should they care when we grab pitchforks for reality? Literally boy who cries wolf situation here and that's why I'm calling it laughable. Just as it is laughable when the OP doubled down and called the accepting of crypto donations like wearing a swastika. It is just ridiculously disingenuous and delegitimizes any serious complaints. So it is entirely counterproductive.
I'll save my pitchfork when the bullshit becomes real, not when the bullshit is based on flimsy rumors and egregious mischaracterizations. That's a witch hunt, and I don't want any part of that.
> money (which they desperately need)
True. But crypto is bad publicity and everyone knows it. At that point it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign (sorry, Poe's law triggered) and saying it's an ancient Buddhist symbol.
> No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search
Did you read my comment? The problem is that this takes focus away from the browser core. Why did they kill Servo? Were are XUL API replacements that were promised? The AI fluff could have been an extension - and that would keep everyone happy.
> It feels off-mission.
Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all. Unless that's a vibe check that's it. Somebody already posted an xkcd of it, I'm just doubling: https://xkcd.com/463/
> We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold?
Unfortunately it's pretty hard to define where "hand aren't made of gold" stops and "gotta call a HAZMAT decontamination team" starts.
> Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet?
The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well. It didn't lasted because of inherit incentives issue. And so if Mozilla is the last line of defense it'd better have some distinguishing features other than "we are not google". Because if they keep focusing on "average user" (btw it's my firm belief that the said user doesn't exist outside management's heads) their incentives wouldn't be any different.
> So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
That's what I'm doing personally. But the forks barely have resources to remove the crap, yet alone implement new features.
I don't see anyone getting all up in arms about the Wayback Machine, The EFF, or plenty of others who accept cryptocurrencies as payments.
And again, to equate it to shipping a miner in the browser is BEYOND EGREGIOUS. It is nothing short of laughable.
We don't know the full context since it is summarized. Maybe he was explicitly asked. But honestly I read it as a bad joke along the lines of "we could be evil and greedy if we really wanted money, but we're not." But I don't know how you can read what was actually written as anything remotely close to suggesting they might even consider blocking ad blockers. At best it is making mountains out of mole hills but even that is being generous to your interpretation. This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil. But Google does. And whatever the situation is, Google having competition and being tied up from implementing evil is a good thing. In the worst situation, assuming Mozilla is more evil than Google (lol), it buys us more time for another player who isn't evil to enter the space and gain browser market share. But if we let Google kill Firefox then that 3rd player is going to have a much harder barrier to entry.So yeah, I'm sticking with laughable. Because all you're accomplishing is handing market share to Google. All you're doing is repeating the same thing that's been happening for years. Crypto, AI, whatever, it is the same thing. People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
> This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil.
I guess that's where we disagree a lot. If Google monopolizes the web completely, it'll end up with the web dying as a relevant platform. Just like it happened with Win32 (sure, after a decade or so of constant suffering), just like it happened to minis&mainframes. Because, let's face it, being a platform monopolist isn't very profitable unless you are screwing the developers and users so hard they'll jump on the first opportunity. And it's not like the web isn't worth saving as it is now, but it is not worth saving if it is going to turn into corporate crap.
> . People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
People expect a lawnmower to chop off their hands if they stick one into it. People don't expect a nonprofit declaring their dedication to freedoms to chop their hands off - and not even single fingers. Yes, declaring moral superiority means you will be judged a lot.
> You can call crypto a bullshit fad loved by scammers without saying anyone that accepts it is a Nazi.
I'm actually mostly on your side in this debate, but to clarify that's not actually what I think they were saying here. I think they were talking about folks who argue that the swastiki was a Buddhist symbol first so it's fine to wear it in public... They aren't technically wrong they're just assholes.
He was comparing that attitude to folks who endorse crypto, not literally calling them Nazi's.
Fair, that is a different interpretation but I still think it's a bad comparison.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core
No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is.
You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.
And how exactly is the AI going to give Mozilla money? I mean not investor money, but actual profit? By alienating their moat userbase (privacy-minded technies)? Because if not for the AI haters, nobody would care about Firefox __at all__.
Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.
By selling the default LLM slot, exactly the same way they sell the default search engine slot.
Mozilla could instead stop giving all the google money to a CEO who only knows how to say "me too! AI too!"
Maybe hire some engineers instead?
Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.
By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.
A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need.
> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.
Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.
I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.
They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
Proton started banning journalists and political dissidents, so they're a joke now.
They have some of that. Password sync is free for example though. (If private enough for you) and they have email relay and vpn as a paid feature
I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
Fully disagree. I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one. Why do I need them in my browser, and why does my browser need to focus on something that, several years into the hype wave, I still *do not use at all*? And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I'd be elated if Firefox solely focused on "the pre-AI era", as you put it, and many other power users would, too. And I somehow doubt my non-techie family cares - if anything, they're tired of seeing the stupid sparkle icons crammed down their throats at every single corner of the world now.
There are many features you are not using in all your software. Just being there, should not be a problem for people. You should evaluate a software by what it's giving you, and which harm it brings, not by what it's giving others you do not care about.
And so far, we can assume that AI in Firefox will be like all the other stuff people don't care about, just optional, a button here, a menu-entry there, just waiting for interaction, but not harmful.
I agree, why support pushing the masses into another big tech machinery that just rips off their data and collectively makes it worse for all of us again? We are already way too cool with people frying their brains on X, TikTok, Instagram and whatnot. If anything, as devs, we should help people get back to focus on their own lifes over monetization of attentionspans. But this industry has no backbone and is constantly letting people down for a quick buck.
You never translate any websites?
AI tools are here to stay. They will start to creep into everything, everywhere, all the time. Either you recognize the moment at which it becomes a significant disadvantage not to use them (I agree that moment is not now), or get left behind.
The metaverse is here to stay! Blockchain is the future!
Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!
They did actually jump on metaverse with Firefox reality and Mozilla hubs. Both weren't bad products at all. Both are now cancelled and they have done basically nothing for Mozilla's market position.
Edit: so I mean I agree here in case that wasn't clear
Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?
> or get left behind.
Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.
Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:
There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.
Compare and contrast with AI:
LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.
Non corporate VR is actually doing some interesting things - but yeah, what Meta did with it was pure garbage.
I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)
Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.
Well stated, agreed. :)
Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).
I don't think it's quite that simple. A great deal of work has nothing to do with computers, and even more human activity has nothing to do with economic advantage. The scope of your statement is a bit too broad in that regard but for computer based work I think you are a) more or less right but b) if you are right it's not clear how much economic benefit LLMs will actually provide on balance, long term.
Does it make the world a better place, and more prosperous? Does it just move economic activity around a bit in regards to who is doing what? We'll find out in ten years when the retrospective economic studies are done.
People wonder why there's a backlash when the pro-AI side sounds like the Borg.
I disagree and I think the moment is now. Gemini 2.5 and now 3.0 is incredible. People that don’t recognize that and use AI tools now are as silly as a craftsman that uses a hammer as a screwdriver when he has a screwdriver in his toolbox. A good craftsman uses the right tool for the job to save time and do a better job and knows the limitations of each tool.
I can spend hours learning photoshop and then trying out color schemes for my new intricately detailed historic house or removing a car from the driveway or I can use Nano Banana and be done in a prompt. There is dignity in learning all that minutiae but I don’t care, I’m not a Photoshop artist, I just want the result and to just move on with my life and get the house painted.
AI crap has already been crammed into everything for months now, and nobody like it nor wants it. There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.
> There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.
While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out, there's definitely evidence that the models can keep improving until that point.
"Sooner or later", given the trend lines, is sill enough to do to SWEng what Wikipedia did to Encyclopædia Britannica: Still exists, but utterly changed.
> While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out
This will certainly happen with the models that use weird proprietary licenses, which people only contribute to if they're being paid, but open ones can continue beyond that point.
The hyperscalers are buying enough compute and energy to distort the market, enough money thrown at them to distort the US economy.
Open models, even if 100% of internet users joined an AI@HOME kind of project, don't have enough resources to do that.
You are right, machine learning models usually improve with more data and more parameters. Open model will never have enough resources to reach a compatible quality.
However, this technology is not magic, it is still just statistics, and during inference it looks very much like your run of the mill curve fitting (just in a billion parameter space). An inherent problem in regression analysis is that at some point you have too many parameters, and you are actually fitting the random errors in your sample (called overfitting). I think this puts an upper limit on the capabilities of LLMs, just like it does for the rest of our known tools of statistics.
There is a way to prevent that though, you can reduce the number of parameters and train a specialized model. I would actually argue that this is the future of AI algorithms and LLMs are kind of a dead end with usefulness limited to entertainment (as a very expensive toy). And that current applications of LLMs will be replaced by specialized models with fewer parameters, and hence much much much cheaper to train and run. Specialized models predate LLMs and we have a good idea of how an open source model fares in that market.
And it turns out, open source specialized models have proven them selves quite nicely actually. In go we have KataGo which is one of the best models on the market. Similarly in chess we have Stockfish.
> I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I recently listened to a podcast (probably The Verge) talking about how an author was suddenly getting more purchases from his personal website. He attributed it to AI chatbots giving his personal website as the best place to buy rather than Amazon, etc. An AI browser might be a way to take power away from all the big players.
> And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I suspect I only Google for about 1/4 of things I used to (maybe less). Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
While I am a techie and I do use Firefox -- that's not a growing niche. I think AI will become spectacularly better for non-techies because it can simply give them what they ask for. LLMs have solved the natural language query issue.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
> Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
I think half the people who think AI is incredibly dumb and can't understand why anyone is using it is because they're using the free samples. This whole thing is so horribly expensive that they lose money even on people who pay therefore the free samples are necessarily as minimal as they can get away with.
The free samples worked famously initially to get people to try it initially, though.
But whenever that free Gemini text pops up in my search, I know why people think it's stupid. But that's not the experience I have with paid options.
> Why ... wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
Funnily enough, this is exactly how I justify Googling stuff instead of asking Gemini. Different strokes I guess!
> > I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I had to use a ledger database at work for audit trails because they were hotness. I think we were one of the few that actually used AWS QLDB.
The experience I've had with people submitting AI generated code has been poor. Poor performing code, poor quality code using deprecated methods and overly complex functionality, and then poor understanding of why the various models chose to do it that way.
I've not actually seen a selling point for me, and "because Google is enshittifying its searches" is pretty weak.
I've been posting recently how I refactored a few different code bases with the help of AI. Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller. AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe: incredibly powerful but only if you understand exactly what you're doing otherwise it will happily make a big mess.
if you have to understand exactly what you're doing, why not just... do it?
That question completely misunderstands what AI is for. Why would I just do it when the AI did it for me in less time that I could myself and mechanically in a way that is arguably harder for a human to do? AI is surprisingly good at identifying all the edge cases.
i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?
but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.
It seems to me you're coming in with a negative preconceptions (e.g. "insipid, pandering chatbot"). What part about coding is fun for you? What part is boring? Keep the fun bits and take the boring bits and have the LLM do those.
> Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller.
I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
> AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe
I would liken it more to dynamite.
> I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
Why would I accept slop out of the AI? I don't. So I don't have any.
I don't understand the disconnect here. Some people really want to be extremely negative about this pretty amazing technology while the rest of us have just incorporated it into our workflow.
> How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
I don't, hence why I have to take your word for it.
The PRs that people have submitted where they either told me up front or admitted to using AI after the review probed as to why they would be inconsistent in their library usage were not good and required substantial rework.
Yes, some people may submit PRs that used AI and were good. But if so, they haven't told me but I would have hoped that people advocating it would have either told me or got me to review, said it is good, and then told me it was a test and the AI passed. So far that hasn't happened, so I'm not convinced it's a regular occurrence.
Maybe the problem with understanding the benefits of AI is that you are relying on other people to use AI properly. As the direct user myself, I don't have that problem.
I'm using it to make things better rather than just producing. Even just putting it in agent mode and saying "look at all my code and tell me where I can make it better" is an interesting exercise. Some suggestions I take, some I don't.
> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.
> Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
There was also no expectation of process isolation in Mozilla Firefox when Google Chrome first came into the scenes. Electrolysis was painful for Mozilla and yet it was necessary.
So instead of being flexible enough to adapt to new requirements as users demand them, they are blindly implementing things before they are requested just in case?
Believe it or not well-intentioned developers, product managers, etc can read the writing on the wall and see where user expectations are heading based on the apps and products they already use.
Exactly why I am baffled. You would think they could read the writing on the wall.
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own.
More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now.
Again, I don't like it, but that's the reality.
Quoting myself from another thread.
> I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
> I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Being against the random inclusion of AI in the browser, isnt the same as being against AI completely. It needs to justify its presence.
Video games are incredibly popular and my mom plays them, does that mean Firefox should have video games baked in at the base layer?
Firefox needs to immediately build Candy Crush into the browser. Users expect to be able to access Candy Crush and only at the layer of web browser can such a thing be implemented.
In a world where people expect games in their browsers, sure.
Co-worker was talking about how he tried to make invitation card with chatgpt, just a picture of his house and text and AI failed to do it. It said he didn't have copyright to the picture and used another random pic, layout was wrong etc. Then younger co-worker gave tips how to do it, what tools to use and offered to make it with his better AI program.
What could be done in few minutes with a free program is now multiple hours with billion dollar AI tools and you have less control what the end result is.
Obviously your co-worker was not able to do it in a few minutes with a free program, or he would just have done it this way.
+ Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini. It has already become the de facto standard for learning. AI in browsers is inevitable.
"Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini"
Yes.
"It has already become the de facto standard for learning."
Maybe.
"AI in browsers is inevitable."
Why. How does that follow. It seems like ChatGPT and Gemini are already working fine, what does the integration add?
And assuming people want deeper integration is the browser even the right level of abstraction? Arguably it would be better to have something that was operating at the OS level, like siri/gemini assistant style.
When Microsoft completely integrates its LLM into Windows, would you rather give that access to your browser, or would you rather plug in your own local model / turn it off entirely while browsing?
If a global LLM becomes standard, I'd want to plug in my own local model or disable it entirely, but I don't think Microsoft nor Apple are going to open up their operating systems and make it easy to do that any time soon. The option to granularly use your own models is a plus to me in that situation.
Every app has to open itself for integration, especially if it's not a native app like Firefox. From where they get the AI at the end doesn't really matter, they will support them all anyway.
Precisely. Like the winner could be in 100 spaces, but more likely going to be something global.
Filling out forms, booking tickets, summarizing content ...
Even at work, have seen few junior developers use AI browsers to attend mandatory compliance courses and complete quizzes. Not necessarily a good thing but AI browsers may win in the end and it might be too late for Firefox.
?????
Why does the existance of an AI chat box website mean a browser must do more than take you to that website?
The forceful inclusion of LLMs in places that have no value are simultaneously ubiquitous and obnoxious.
Because the chatbox can't access other websites, doing its work there. That's what integration is all about, to connect parts.
"why do I have to go and fill with copy paste that form or navigate through that page to do $something if that AI browser can do it for me?"
And in that scenario, there is a GIGANTIC need for a user-first, privacy-respecting browser using ideally local models (in a few years, when HW is ready)
Again: ???????
You people need to be forced to use your product in the exact form your product is presented to end users. With the exact frequency it's presented to end users. In all the wrong places as it is presented to end users.
Maybe then you'll understand why shoving AI in every conceivable crevice is incredibly obnoxious and distracting and, most importantly, not useful.
Shoving an AI agent in every website is distracting and not that useful. Shoving an AI agent in every app is distracting as well.
Having one global AI agent per operating system or browser (where most of the digital life happens, in the case of desktop browsers), for the people that want to have an AI agent, it's probably going to be useful, if well implemented.
OS might make sense, but the browser level is a weird middle space for it.
I know, but at the end of the day most people nowadays do the vast majority of their job in a browser, and there is already a well defined API to manage its content. Also browsers are coming there faster and at some point it will become what people expect, rather what's most optimal.
Last I checked Firefox was sitting at 4% browser market share. If you include Brave you just get to 5%[0].
So truth is that privacy isn't enough to get people to switch. 5% share isn't enough to stay alive and protect privacy.
This is the job of every engineer. Your job is to understand the product and where it advances and where it can help the users. The users don't know the technical side. They barely know what they want. Yes, you should listen to users but you also have to read between the lines to actually figure out what they want. Frankly, the truth of the matter is that what people say they want is very different than what they actually want.Work with customers and you'll experience this first hand... I thought it was a big enough meme that everyone knew this
Speaking about reading between the lines, the privacy community is not very good at advocating for privacy. Look at Signal, it has similar backlash to Mozilla. The community shoots itself in the foot because the products are not perfect. But here's the thing, both Signal and Firefox are not products intended to maximize privacy at all costs. They are products to maximize privacy while being appealing to the masses. Are there more secure and private solutions out there? Hell yeah. But are those tools practical for the masses? Don't fool yourselves.
So stop with this bullshit, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You don't have to use Firefox to root for them. Go use a fork like the Mullvad browser or Waterfox. If you're a power user then just be a fucking power user. I use Arch but that doesn't mean I'm going to piss on Ubuntu every chance I get. I fucking hate Ubuntu but I'm going to root for them because every new Ubuntu user is one less for Microsoft and Apple and every new Ubuntu user is a potential new <literally any other distro is better> user. So why get angry because someone is making a step in the right direction? So what if their legs aren't long enough to get all the way to where you are (which didn't take one step either!).
So let's be very clear about this. I'm not mad at you because I want AI in Firefox (I don't), I'm mad at you because you're attacking our literal last line of defense for a secure and private internet. I'm mad at you for purity testing. Stop with this "no true Scotsman" bullshit. We can have those arguments at a later date when Firefox isn't on its last leg and/or when we have a diverse choice in browsers. But at this point *all you are doing is advocating for Chrome*. Whether you realize it our not. We've been playing this fucking game for a decade now and you can either look at the results or continue to ignore them. But it didn't work, so we need to try something else.
[0] https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
>This is the job of every engineer.
No its not. Engineering is about right sizing the product. This is not that. Theres no user story, theres no pressing demand. Every CTO in the world might be racing to force AI into their products regardless of utility but there's no reason to pretend this is being done for good engineering reasons.
>Work with customers and you'll experience this first hand.
Theres no customer benefit to shoving AI in every application at every layer. This is not about the customer. This is about a race to cram the feature in every conceivable space and see where it sticks. This is corporate and has no sense of good engineering. They also don't want it. What a combo. No utility and no demand. If anything its a bit like the story of fish fingers, where the pressing need, was the big warehouse full of unwanted fish bits that they wanted to move, and the innovation was productising it in such a way that people would actually purchase and consume it. In this case we have DC's full of AI cards that desperately want a market. It might be uncharitable, but I do wonder if the Mozilla Foundation has been promised some financial reward if they solve this issue.
There has not been any demonstrable requirements gathering for this change. An executive directed this, and to pretend otherwise is insane.
>Speaking about reading between the lines, the privacy community is not very good at advocating for privacy.
No they aren't very good at it at all, but that's a massive non sequitur.
>So stop with this bullshit, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
No, defending Firefox from valid criticism is the self inflicted injury.
>I use Arch but that doesn't mean I'm going to piss on Ubuntu every chance I get.
Ok, but I would think it fair and reasonable to criticise Ubuntu if they decided to randomly cram an opt out LLM into the distro, and I think your criticism of them also deserves to be heard. You dont need to be the Ubuntu or Firefox internet defense force.
>So why get angry because someone is making a step in the right direction?
I haven't been angry at a single firefox user here, I would ask you to stop making things up just to be angry about. There's not an ounce of "Boycott" or anything in my posts. I am writing this from firefox. I am permitted, to be critical of the browser I am using.
>I'm mad at you because you're attacking our literal last line of defense for a secure and private internet.
"Attacking". Its clearly necessary criticism. The devaluing of the product is coming from inside the house. Their chief rival is, critically, releasing a separate browser to test their AI features in. For Chrome itself Gemini is in the extension store. It is OPT IN, not OPT OUT. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gemini-for-chrome/a... Their chief rival is respecting end user consent better. If you want them to be a more popular browser, why don't you hold them to a better standard than Chrome, instead of policing the critics?
(Also boo for making me open chrome to check)
>Stop with this "no true Scotsman" bullshit.
I literally cannot identify a no true scotsman argument in my comments. Theres a difference between saying "No TRUE web browser would" and pointing out validly that there's no interest or demand in the feature being rolled out. If anything, the closest thing in this thread to a no true scotsman, while still failing it technically, is the idea that you cant be a true supporter of privacy while being critical of Mozilla.
>We can have those arguments at a later date when Firefox isn't on its last leg and/or when we have a diverse choice in browsers.
No now is a great time.
>But at this point all you are doing is advocating for Chrome.
No I am asking them to be competitive with chrome, and treat users that well or better.
>But it didn't work, so we need to try something else.
Enshittification isnt a plan.
Translate requires you to download the model for language pairs. That's opt-in.
The chatbots aren't chatbots, they're just a fucking shortcut to the 5th most popular website on the internet.
I hate to break it to you, but there's also a shortcut to the #1, #2, #4, #6, #7, #9, #10, and #13 most popular websites. It's the literal url bar... You can type "!w hacker news" to search wikipedia for hacker news.
Sorry, it is just as laughable to say firefox is shoving Wikipedia down your throat as it is to say they're shoving AI.
Do you realize how big an LLM is? Clearly you don't. The browser isn't going to fit on a lot of people's computers if they shove an LLM in.And hey, if you feel I'm wrong here go jump on a fork that isn't going to add those things like Mullvad or Waterfox. That's still supporting Firefox in the way of standing against Google while also making a clear signal that you don't want those features. Have your cake and eat it too, but I'm saying "Shut up with the talk that makes people switch to Chrome". We have to be honest with ourselves here. All this outrage at Mozilla for not being pure enough is just driving people to Chrome. That's why I'm calling all this fucking idiotic. It's a literal footgun. But don't listen to me look at what's happened in the past. Look at the comments here. Look at the comments in the past. FFS people were equating Mozilla accepting crypto donations with shipping a miner in the browser. It literally takes place in the Mastadon thread we're all talking about. Those things are wildly different and it is wildly a disingenuous interpretation.
So yeah, I'm going to keep calling this complaining idiotic and counterproductive. We've been grabbing our pitchforks for years every time Mozilla even slightly steps out of line, or even if we think they might! And for years their browser share has been siphoned off to Chrome or some painted up variant. So forgive me if I don't believe your actions align with the goals you claim. And forgive me if I cannot distinguish complaining from criticism, because as I've stated above, your evidence doesn't appear to be what you claim it is. Saying they're shipping LLMs is just as disingenuous as saying they shipped a crypto miner. It is such a grotesque mischaracterization that it is laughable.
>"Shut up with the talk that makes people switch to Chrome".
No this is silly and you should dispense with it. Theres no cow so sacred it cant be criticised.
>Do you realize how big an LLM is? Clearly you don't.
Yes I do, I have run qwen 4b locally.
>The browser isn't going to fit on a lot of people's computers if they shove an LLM in.
The point I was making. Anything down this track is going to cause resource headaches, browsers are already a resource headache.
>We've been grabbing our pitchforks for years every time Mozilla even slightly steps out of line
I have been cool with literally everything else they have done, and even spent time pointing out that the T&C changes were relatively normal practice. Lumping me in with every other criticism you don't like is a genetic fallacy.
>It's a literal footgun.
Its community feedback. They ignore it at their peril.
> But don't listen to me look at what's happened in the past. Look at the comments here. Look at the comments in the past. FFS people were equating Mozilla accepting crypto donations with shipping a miner in the browser. It literally takes place in the Mastadon thread we're all talking about. Those things are wildly different and it is wildly a disingenuous interpretation.
I dont see how you are equating these. My post isn't in the Mastodon thread.
>Saying they're shipping LLMs
You literally quoted my "if", not reading and understanding how that word modifies the language around it is on you.
Theres really 2 states until there's an OS level LLM layer.
1. Shipping a low parameter/ otherwise compressed LLM.
2. LLM features are non local, with all the headaches that entails.
> And hey, if you feel I'm wrong here go jump on a fork that isn't going to add those things like Mullvad or Waterfox
I am required as a matter of employment to use an approved web browser 9-5. We have strict rules against AI use, only permitting copilot with enterprise data protection. (Using copilot without that stupid green tick, and letting customer data into it, is an instant RGE, same with any other LLM)
Another leg of this, is that I have 1000 profiles on 1000 computers for quite a few different customers. The nature of my work does not permit a single profile that roams to every computer I use. I cannot cross the streams between multiple customers.
I am not going to be asked to go to every PC and server, and opt out of AI features. I am likely to be asked to completely remove Firefox as an approved browser, pull it off every machine, and push only Microsoft Edge going forward. Because perversely, it auto signs in to Copilot with EDP via 365, if EDP has been purchased. So it can (sadly) do whatever the fuck it wants.
We are super sensitive to supply chain stuff, so are unlikely to be permitted to use any fork. We recently dismissed an addon for a product that was developed, by one of the core developers of the product, on his own time as an extra feature. Why? The guy didnt spend a lot of time maintaining it and seemed overwhelmed with pull requests. I haven't looked at the Firefox forks, but I know our security posture and its probably a non starter.
Even the idea that an unapproved LLM could scoop up what I am browsing is going to poison the well.
And like I have repeatedly stated, I like firefox. I want to use firefox. Part of the reason I want to use firefox is that it has no LLM instead of the approved LLM that I detest.
Even if Firefox goes "aha, we will implement our service to connect to Copilot with EDP" it would have to do so in a fashion where it is completely seamless, and zero touch, with no failback to regular copilot or another service. I cant conceive of Microsoft being that friendly.
We aren't alone in this. Lots of organisations are making similar decisions. I speak to other service providers going through the same headaches. Our contracts make it our responsibility to actively prevent customer data exfiltration, which is a basic feature and requirement of a lot of LLM implementations. As you stated, the browser LLM will want the browser window context. Microsoft (sadly) understands this, and knows that users will desire path to an LLM if one isn't available, and they understand what words we need written into the service agreement to make EDP attractive. Copilot is terrible, its also perfect for enterprise.
Firefox has over the last few years become a starkly friendly safe haven for privacy focused work. I feel, or at least felt, completely safe performing sensitive work with their product. Work being the keyword in enterprise. Things that become a toy or a risk go away. Chrome use in similar orgs to mine is decreasing for various similar reasons.
I am not sure if you think losing a decent chunk of enterprise users with sensitive requirements is worth it but at least you spent your time defending Firefox from criticism that might have retained those users? And when Firefox is just feature for feature exactly doing what chrome is doing, you might see new users show up for some reason? I don't see that as a winning strategy.
I really don't think they should play the ice cream vendor game at all. Let Edge and Chrome play in that space. Give firefox room to not suck. Let firefox be an actual alternative with significant points of difference not just an also ran.
I don't believe in sacred cows, but unlike you I do not believe there is a cow so profane that it should be vilified at every turn.
All you are doing is teaching Mozilla to ignore you.If they do bad you get angry. If they do good you get angry because it isn't good enough.
They cannot win! So tell me, why they should listen. Maybe they can do good enough by you but by doing so that won't be good enough by millions of others. And why should they optimize for one person?
Do not conflate my disbelief in demons as a belief in gods. You are confused at who is the religious one here
This is how Firefox fell behind Chrome and bled their entire market share. The strategy of letting Chrome out innovate them and then copy what they think is good is not a strategy that works.
I'm quite sure only "we" care about esoteric browser features.
"Does it have tabs? OK. Fine."
Firefox losing market share were probably more due to Google nagging desktop users than features.
What did Chrome have that Firefox didn't?
Not crashing frequently due to having proper tab isolation and a sane extention system.
You and your argument are reductionist.
Firefox fell behind Chrome because of aggressive marketing from Google in a way that probably violates some antitrust laws if they were actually being enforced, combined with a couple of own-goals from Mozilla.
Basically Google exploits their market dominance in Search and Mail to get people to use Chrome (and probably their other services too). When you search in a non-Chrome browser, you'll be constantly informed by Google about how much better their search is with Chrome through pop-ups and in-page notifications (not browser notifs). If you click a link in the Gmail app on iOS, rather than opening the browser, you get a Chrome advertisement if they detect it isn't your default browser.
This goes hand-in-hand with Chrome being the default Android browser (don't underestimate the power of being the default) and Mozilla alienating their core audience of power users by forcibly inserting features that those power users despise.
Chrome never won on features, it won on marketing and abuse of a different monopoly.
It works pretty well for Apple
Not on desktop. They are losing market share to chrome year over year.
> Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
I'm also wondering how much of what they come up with could be implemented as an addon instead of a core part of the browser.
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
If you want to be a power user, then be a power user. Switch to a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox.
Seriously, I don't get the problem here. I don't want AI in my browser either, but it is pretty simple for us who care to switch away. It's even easy for those who aren't technically skilled!
If this is what stops Firefox from drowning then I'm all for it. They are our last line of defense from a Google controlled internet. What Firefox puts in their browser isn't that critical to me (i.e. doesn't affect me) as long as it stays open source and there are forks. But Firefox dying does! So yeah, I'm gonna root for Firefox even when it does things I don't want because what I care about far more than any specific browser feature is the internet not being controlled by any single entity.
So can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?
>If this is what stops Firefox from drowning
By having the most engaged users leave and splinter the community furtehr in hopes that Mozilla out competes the trillion dollar monopoly in a war of data centers? We really will do anything except message your policy makers, huh?
I migrated several times before and am browsing around now. Id even be so bold to say that Mozilla dying will not kill the Quantum web engine scene, so I have no allegiance to rooting for yet another billion dollar corporation that has continually proven that their customers are not their interest. But I don't think "no one cares about you, just leave" is the healthiest option for your stated goals.
>Can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?
This isn't an argument, this is my statement. I don't want my tools to be bloated.
If the entire idea of a web browser collapses overnight, I'll make due. But the last thing I'll be accused of is remaining silent and having this industry bewildered on how this apocalypse came upon them. They got feedback and ignored it, stopped competing on merits over trends, and lost sight of what people actually want. That's their choice, and they will reap what they sow.
Seriously, I don't get the problem. As far as I'm aware the only things that are opt-out are the smart tabs. Which is a 22.6MB and 57MB vector embedding models that can be easily removed.
So what bloat?
They said everything will be opt-in and that's cool with me. If they go back on that then yeah, grab the fucking pitchforks and I'll be right there with you because fuck those lying bastards. But so far they haven't done that so put the pitchfork down. All you're doing is being over zealous and attacking the greater enemy's (Chrome) enemy. You don't have to call Firefox your ally but it's pretty clear that Chrome is significantly more misaligned with your wants than Firefox is. So stop attacking the best thing we got right now.
I'm pretty confident this is happening because all the privacy maximalists are not actually privacy maximalists and would rather lick the fucking boot than take a knight who's armor isn't pure. Doesn't matter if that boot is orange and shaped like a lion, it's still the boot.I'm sorry the choices are slim. I really do wish it was better. But we're never going to get there if we kill the last thing standing against the monopoly. So yeah, pick the right fucking battle.
>I bet you're grateful for that person too even if you don't know it.
I'm grateful for actions, not words. I don't see much action here.
>Seriously, I don't get the problem.
Easy to be blind when you choose not to see. I don't have much to add to neither the llm nor Mozilla debate. We have plenty of literature on the issues with both.
You're not paying attention
Or
The lack of perfection, and existence of opposition, blinds you to such action.
It isn't words I expect you you be grateful for, it's actions.
While it's far from perfect and far from where I'd personally like things to be, there is progress being made on the privacy and digital rights fronts. We've won the right to repair. We've struck down strong efforts to kill net neutrality. Several states have stronger data rights for their citizens[0]! And we've done much more! It's an uphill battle but that doesn't mean it's one we're losing!
You're right!But I'm not the one making everything black and white. It's good to strive for perfection, but if you're waiting till it's achieved then you'll be waiting for eternity.
Worse, if you're hyper critical at progress towards the world we want then we'll never get there. If you complain when a company does wrong and when a company makes a step in the right direction that's not big enough then why should they ever listen to you? All you've told them is that there's nothing they can do that will make you[1] happy. So why should they listen? Why should they even try?
You play a dangerous game. One we already know how it plays out...
[0] https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-state-privacy-legislat...
[1] and everyone else like you that is not 100% aligned in your wants. No company can make all of you perfectly happy at the same time because you are not identical people.
I think the core of the issue is that Mozilla is thinking big. They're not happy to service a niche well (which the majority of the comments on Mozilla related posts is generally asking them to), they want to get back to their glory days, capture the mainstream.
And that is tough. Chrome won because it was an, at the time, superior product, AND because it had an insane marketing push. I remember how it was just everywhere. Every other installer pushed Chrome on you, as well as all the Google properties, it was all over the (tech) news, shaping new standards aggressively etc. Not something Mozilla can match.
But they just won't give up. I don't know if I should applaud that or not, but I think it's probably the core of the disconnect between Mozilla and the tech community. They desperately want to break into the mainstream again, their most vocal supporters want them to get a reality check on their ambitions.
If I was running Mozilla, I'd probably go for the niche. It's less glamorous, but servicing a niche is relatively easy, all you have to do is listen to users and focus on stuff they want and/or need. You generally get enough loyalty to be able to move a bit behind the curve, see what works for others first, then do your own version once it's clear how it'll be valuable to the user base. I'd give this strategy the highest chance of long term survival and impact.
Mainstream is way tougher. You kinda need to make all kinds of people with different needs happy enough, and get ahead of where those wants and needs are going.
One could argue they could do both: Serve a niche well with Firefox and try to reach the mainstream with other products. I think to some degree they've tried it, with mixed results.
The mainstream didn't get mainstream by striving to go with mainstream. They got there by serving a niche well and then expanding the niche. Trying to go mainstream without having a niche moat will make you lag behind the establishment endlessly.
I'm not an Apple fan (rather an Apple hater if you would), but they are a perfect example of this. First, have a top quality niche product, then go into the big waters with the vision you got from the niche - and then people will actually be willing to give up bells and whistles the product that is good enough.
Mozilla have a well-established niche with a vision, but they can't monetize without giving up the vision they have (and apparently consider opening for small direct donations or maybe even direct bug/feature crowdsourcing not worth it). So they keep jumping on every sidetrack. And keep losing even the niche they have.
> 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans
It's not great. Great would be "we'll stop wasting money on extraneous features and we'll concentrate on making Firefox the best browser".
This is damage control.
> this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
Why though? Seriously.
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.
I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.
Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.
On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.
Exploratory yes but when you're still exploring it's not a great idea to bet a whole company on something that might not pan out. Or to dump stuff on users with lots of promotion that may or not be actually useful.
And yeah for accessibiity a lot of this is hugely useful but that's a very niche usecase.
And yes AI-assisted search (or deep research, even better) is also something I like. But it's also because search engines themselves have become so enshittified and promote bad content first.
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
The pattern is that I seek out useful tools. I don't wait for them to be rained down and force fed to me. Just because meat is useful to me doesn't mean I want to be subscribed to a grocery store who will deliver meat every month. That's an overkill of resources for most consumers.
You literally have to download the language models if you want to enable translation. That's "opt-in" not "opt-out"...
> Do you ever...
There probably is a big difference between 'do you ever' and 'how often do you'.
I very rarely visit websites that I want translated; so rarely that I can tolerate google translate, or copying and pasting a section of a page into a tab with gemini; so on its own, this feature wouldn't sell me a browser. Besides, as a sibling comment says, even the current non-AI-enhanced browsers offer, sometimes too intrusively, to translate a page in a non-matching language. At least Chrome does this to me.
Your second scenario happens much more frequently; but again, it is so frictionless to type the term or a phrase in a search box in another tab that I never find myself wishing for a dedicated panel in the browser that could do this for me.
Your third scenario, for me, is finding something in api docs. Like, what's that command again to git cherry-pick a range of commits? So far, just googling this stuff or asking copilot / gemini in a separate tab has always worked. I am not sure I would be upset at a browser that didn't have an inbuilt tool for doing this.
What I do want from a web browser is evergreenness, the quickest and fullest adoption of all the web specs, and great web developer tools.
> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
These are incredibly poor AI sells...
>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.
Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.
This is exactly it.
There's no fucking way there's going to be a "full LLM integrated into every browser." You really think they're going to drop in a 20GB-200GB model with every browser? Mind you, Llama-8B is over 15GB.
Nah. So far they are doing about 50MB per language translation that you ask for[0]. You have to explicitly install languages to translate.
There's neither "a full blown LLM" (whatever that means) nor forcing AI onto you. You still have to download the language packs, they are just offering an extension that more seamlessly integrates with the browser.
And we know what they're building too! Go look in the "Labs" tab and you'll see an opt-in for testing a semantic search of your history. That doesn't take an LLM to do, that takes a vector embedding model. What next? Semantic search in page? How terrible of a feature! (But seriously, can we get regex search?)
[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/neural-machine-translation...
"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
and then get something that I can understand enough to say And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in>Starting today, Google Translate uses advanced Gemini capabilities to better improve translations on phrases with more nuanced meanings like idioms, local expressions or slang.
https://blog.google/products/search/gemini-capabilities-tran... [Dec 12, 2025]
Firefox is local
I think it's simpler than that. AI is fast becoming synonymous with something being force fed and generally unwanted.
I mean a Firefox download is 150MB, not 16GB...
Plus, we know what Firefox is looking to do. In their labs tab they let you opt into trying out semantic search of your history. So that's a vector embedding model, not an LLM.
Edit:
Okay, they have "Shake to summarize". But that's a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. Nothing shipped with the browser. Similarly I don't understand how the chatbot window is so controversial. I̶'̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶but are people really pressing <C-x> on a mac or ctrl+alt+x on linux/windows? It's not a LLM shipped with the browser, it is just a window split ("shortcut") to literally one of the most popular websites on the internet right now (ChatGPT is literally the #5 most visited website and you all think AI is unpopular?!). Adding shortcuts isn't shoving AI down your throat. Are they shoving Wikipedia down your throat because you can do "!w hacker news"? Give me a break guys
That’s different from an agentic browser in a few key ways.
Most importantly it’s far more difficult for a bad actor to abuse language translation features than agentic browser features.
Nowadays they call AI everything. Browsers translate websites from decades, when AI was only a word you would see in science fiction movies.
AI is a broad term going back to 1955. It covers many different techniques, algorithms, and topics. The first AI chess programs (DeepBlue, et. al.) were using tree search algorithms like alpha-beta pruning that are/were classified as AI techniques.
Machine translation is a research topic in AI because translating from one language to another is something humans are good at while computers are not traditionally.
More recently, the machine learning (ML) branch of AI has become synonymous with AI as have the various image models and LLMs built on different ML architectures.
Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
Alternatively: they’re already taking advantage of the AI features they like without at all needing “AI in the browser” and do realise it.
"See but what if instead of ctrl+F, we fired up a nvdia gpu in a data center instead .... "
I'll pass. Also for people that already know another language, the auto translate is annoying, inaccurate, and strips all of the humanity out of the writing.
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."
I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.
Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...
Because the future and market is certain, don’t you know?
> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
The confidence with which people say these things...
s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.
NFT was always a meme and crypto has proven its staying power.
Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
> day to day transactions
Where is this happening?
Between me and my drug dealer
Money laundering? Certainly.
Black market goods? Of course.
Avoiding taxation? Absolutely.
Day to day purchases? Not that I've seen.
Crypto is going to be a new settlement layer thats it. You'll use stripe and they will settle it on their public chain. You are free to use the chain directly but no real consumer is going to do that.
NFT was a meme in "People are going to buy my jpeg"
But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.
Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
The metaverse is clearly the future. Zuckerberg said so, after all.
Browsers without metaverse integration will be a non-starter.
Comparing LLMs to NFT isn't fair. Being able to talk to you computer and have it understand you and even do the things you ask is literally StarTrek technology.
I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.
I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.
I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
The evidence is the billions of people who copy text to and from ChatGPT to other web pages.
But not just other web pages, other apps too. So again, why a browser. Why ask firefoxs pop out expansion panel instead of a right click context menu in word, or a chat interface in copilots phat app or a website chat interface or the precious space under a google search or any of the other 10000 places people are inserting this shit.
And a copy paste task isnt necessarily going to be aided by a pop out sidebar running a local LLM chewing up already precious RAM. There's no guarantee its going to integrate correctly with the users chosen LLM provider.
Like we are looking at having LLM's inserted into almost every customer facing application. At some point, they will want a subscription for each of them or they are all going to need local resources. They are all going to have to be interoperable and run off the same account. Or you are going to have to have something that just works with the whole stack.
It doesn't make a lick of sense to try and preempt that situation, with mainline features pushed to all customers.
Googles approach, having a separate AI enabled browser makes the most sense. If it takes off its because of affirmative user consent and they can merge it into chrome. If it doesn't work they can silently discontinue it like so many other things.
Google has a separate browser for AI features? Gemini has just shown up in Chrome for me.
It’s of course a mess and a mad rush for market share right now. That’s just a product of a healthy, competitive market. I agree that I’d rather have one AI service I pay for that integrates with all my apps.
AI integration in apps is about being able to feed in the context from the app into the model, like the web page or document. It’s much nicer to just ask the model about what you’re looking at directly rather than having to copy in context. I don’t have market research on this, but I do believe customers will expect it.
Someday hopefully the OS will allow apps to expose context and actions for a systemwide AI assistant. This is what Apple is trying to do with their Apple Intelligence for instance. If this works well, that’d be great.
Considering pirating the whole internet and boiling the planet is required to summarize a single page in a mediocre manner, it’s understandable that people who knows how the sausages are made are against it.
We need some regulation on them for sure. They should be paying for the content they train on and use in their search results.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
> They’re still very compelling as a user.
Very not.
>but I personally find it very helpful.
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
It is already optional in Firefox, this is just FUD
The FUD is the implications of making it opt out, with reports that there's already other features that requires changing the settings/flags in order to "opt out".
It's doubt based on previous actions.
then you can install an extension.
I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
If I wanted the average browser, I would have stuck with Chrome, or Edge.
Why does the browser itself need AI features ?
You can still easily visit chagpt via web if Gemini or whatever
It's obvious to you. But many people will think that Firefox doesn't support (accessing) AI unless that feature is prominently displayed.
Most people don't understand how the web works.
Lots of disagreement, but from necessity I (sort of) agree. Firefox foremost needs users. If it takes AI features to get them, so be it. However, Firefox cannot afford to lose its loyal user base, so they have to be optional.
Honestly if it were up to me, yes I'd love Firefox to stay in the niche, but they have to follow the market if they want to stay relevant. I just hope they can push more adoption.
I am highly sceptical of all AI features and it seems Gardner and other cyber security experts are starting to wake up as well:
The programs let you outsource and automate tasks, such as online searches or writing an email, to an AI agent. The only problem is that these same AI capabilities can be tricked into executing malicious commands hidden in websites or emails, effectively turning the browser against the user.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/security-experts-warn-companies-t...
For now this is restricted to Perplexity Comet and OpenAI Atlas and only the UK has issued an official warning, but why would I, personally, want my Firefox browser with an opt-out risk instead of an opt-in?
Yeah, that's like having a browser without without support for blockchain, semantic web or UML! No one would use it without these absolutely critical features!
I'm surprised your take is so controversial. This really is it - yes, the current core users are not interested in AI but most people in our lives who are not techies do use them, and Firefox needs win these users if it wants to stay relevant.
Of course, I have opinions on other ways it could make money instead of jumping on the latest hot thing (pocket, fakespot, VPN, etc) without actually truly building the ecosystem but at least they are trying.
I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.
Why?
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
>Why?
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
0: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
not to mention the high resource-usage of a local LLM that most PCs wouldn't be able to handle, or would just drain a laptop's battery.
All for searching something trivial, where for 99% of cases the already indexed wikipedia summary is good enough and way faster
>Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
but.. why? I can read the website myself. That's why I'm on the website.
People have a limited amount of time, so they may prefer spending it on something else than what a computer can do for them.
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
Most laptops are now shipping with a NPU for handling these tasks. So it wont be getting computed on your GPU.
That doesn't mean anything, it's just a name change. They're the same kind of unit.
And whatever accelerator you try to put into it, you're not running Gemini3 or GPT-5.1 on your laptop, not in any reasonable time frame.
Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
Time will tell, but right now we're not solving the problem of running LLMs by increasing efficiency, we're solving it by massive, unprecedented investments in compute power and just power. Companies definitely weren't building nuclear power stations to power their spell checkers or even 3D renderers. LLMs are unprecedented in this way.
True, but the usefulness of local models is actually getting better. I hope that the current unprecedented madness is a factor of the potential of cloud models, and not a dismissal of the possibility of local models. It's the biggest swing we've seen (with the possible exception of cloud computing vs local virtualisation) but that may be due to recognition of the previous market behaviour, and a desperate need to not miss out on the current boom.
Also it does mean something. An NPU is completely different from your 5070. Yes the 5070 has specific AI cores but it also has raster cores and other things not present in an NPU.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
And all of that is irrelevant for the AI use case. The NPU is at best slightly more efficient than a GPU for this use case, and mostly its just cheaper by forgoing various parts of a GPU that are not useful for AI (and would not be used during inferencing anyway).
And the examples being given of why you'd want AI in your browser are all general text comprehension and conversational discussions about that text, applied to whatever I may be browsing. It doesn't really get less specialized than that.
No, NPUs are designed to be power efficient in ways GPU compute aren't.
You also don't need Gemini3 or GPT anything running locally.
Personally, I don't need AI in my browser at all. But if I did, why would I want to run a crappy model that can't think and hallucinates constantly, instead of using a better model that kinda thinks and doesn't hallucinate quite as often?
I generally agree with you, but you'd be surprised at what lower parameter models can accomplish.
I've got Nemo 3 running on an iGPU on a shitty laptop with SO-DIMM memory, and it's good enough for my tasks that I have no use for cloud models.
Similarly, Granite 4 based models are even smaller, just a couple of gigabytes and are capable of automation tasks, summarization, translation, research etc someone might want in a browser.
Both do chain of reasoning / "thinking", both are fast, and once NPU support lands in runtimes, they can be offloaded on to more efficient hardware.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least in my experience, fuzzy accuracy / stochastic inaccuracy is good enough for some tasks.
That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.
You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
[0] https://research.google/blog/speed-matters/
It makes a big difference when the query runs in a sidebar without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
> without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
well, 2/3 is admirable in this day and age.
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
Unless you've then read through those sources — and not asked the machine to summarize them again — I don't see how that changes anything.
Judging by your tone and several assumptions based on nothing I see that you're fully converted. No reason to keep talking past each other.
No, I'm not "fully converted." I reject the notion that you have to join one cult or the other when it comes to this stuff.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
> I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
And here you get back to my original point: to get good (or at least better) AI, you need complex and huge models, that can't realistically run locally.
You can just look down thread at what people actually expect to do - certainly not (just) text summarization. And even for summarization, if you want it to work for any web page (history blog, cooking description, github project, math paper, quantum computing breakthrough), and you want it accurate, you will certainly need way more than Ollama 8B. Add local image processing (since huge amounts of content are not understandable or summarizable if you can't understand images used in the content), and you'll see that for a real 99% solution you need models that will not run locally even in very wild dreams.
Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?
For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
> Imagine you have an AI button.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
> The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN"
I've already hit that option before reading the other ones.
> "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title"
Why would you bother fetching the clickbait at all? It's spam.
The main transformation I want out of a browser, the absolutely critical one, is the removal of advertising. I concede that AI might be decent at removing ads and all the overlay clutter that makes news sites unreadable; does anyone have the demo of "AI readability mode"? Crucially I do not want it changing any non-ad text found on the page.
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...
I like Firefox and don't think it's about to collapse like many users here, but I have already unchecked "Recommend features as you browse" and "Recommend extensions as you browse" along with setting the welcome page for updates to about:blank.
Ideally the user interface for any tool I use should never change unless I actively prompt it to change, and the only notifications I should get would be from my friends and family contacting me or calendars/alarms that I set myself.
Lots of imagining here.
I have already clicked the all-caps button
Most users are entirely ignorant of privacy and security and will make choices without considering it. I don’t say that to excuse it but it’s absolutely the reality.
I don't know. What if the AI can remove all junk from the page, clean it up, and only leave the content - sort of like ublock origin on steroids?
I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
haha, what if I told you that the currently existing, shipping product, "ChatGPT / Gemini uses a browser for you" will have more users than Firefox in two years? I will even bet you that will likely be the case in 2 months.
> any future
> any user
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.
That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
Just so everyone else knows, the complaining is by definition reactionary.
> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.
> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.
Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.
Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).
Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?
At this point they should just bring back Eich and go fully trad ;)
> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
LOL
Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.
I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."
Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.
before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.
I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
Yes but local translation already is in Firefox and it's already made with some kind of AI model. Nobody complained about that.
What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
What are all the recent AI features? Because I ever only noticed the local translation, and can't find anything else by looking at the menu.
EDIT: Oh, I've found a context menu item-list.
I'm glad to see some mozilla employees standing their base in the comments. That guy trying to make the point that Mozilla was wasting resources chasing trend only for an employee to say it was a few people checking it out while 1000 people continued work on the normal stuff is nice to see.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
Can you point to some of these comments?
People on Mastodon being insufferable, say it ain't so
This feels less like an “anti-AI” stance and more like a trust and control issue. For browsers especially, users have very different threat models and performance expectations, and “always on” AI features blur that line quickly. An explicit opt-out makes sense, but I wonder if the more important question is whether these features can be implemented in a way that’s truly local and auditable. If users can’t clearly understand where data goes and what runs on-device, toggles become a necessary safety valve rather than a preference.
I haven't paid close attention, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla has mostly invested in local AI for tasks such as translation, summarization, and organization. As long as that's the case, I don't see any particular safety or privacy risks; if it works without an Internet connection, it's probably OK.
Summarization is using a chosen cloud-based AI provider.
Are you sure? I see a huge spike in CPU when I long-click on a link to see the preview and summary. This is the newest summarization feature, not the older one with the chatbot on the side.
Ah, didn't know they moved to local models. My comment was about the old chatbot-based feature.
This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern. If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable.
Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.
Apple's Preview is my favourite. It uses AI to allow you to copy text from images. And that's it.
This is my go to example of “ai features that are actually useful to me”. Ubiquitous OCR, and ubiquitous semantic search in photos.
Not a chat bot. Not an “ask ai” button, just those things.
That's not "AI" in the sense of LLMs, which is what the recent trend in AI complaints is about.
> Kagi
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)
> if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
> This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust.
Though not so much trust as an option to enable AI features would build.
The trust is built by not enabling this by default, and by not burying the "kill switch" somewhere in settings that non-power users will never find.
Worse yet, burying in settings where they give a big disclaimer that they can (and often are) reset when the browser updates.
Currently disable switch is right next to AI chat bot settings. It’s pretty on your face.
I've been really confused as to what all the hubub is about. I think I saw the sidebar for about 4 seconds on each of my installs before I hid it forever. I tried to reenable it to see what people were complaining about but couldn't find it within 10 seconds so gave up.
AFAIK, you can't enable them without resetting things in about:config. So it's a "big red button", and that's a good thing.
Keyword: currently
They said they'll create a Bigger Red Switch (TM), so this interim solution is better than nothing, and it's going to get better.
If they're breaking their usual silence to talk about it on Mastodon via an employee/developer, they should better keep their word, because they're on a razor's edge there, and they'll be cut pretty badly if they slip on this one.
saying "trying to slow down, I promise" doesn't magically make your blatant advert not spam
edit: the original post ended with words to the tune of "Totally unrelated, but I run [insert newsletter here]... "
Edited and removed.
Why? Why kowtow to people who don't care about your wellbeing or long term success?
> It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern.
They literally shipped an AI sidebar nobody asked for.
I find it a nice feature.
Firefox should release a separate build - "base", "core", "classic" - clearly, I am not a marketing person, but idea behind it, that this is only a browser without any extra features added. No "AI", no studies, no account sync. Only bare minimum browser, that allows user to do their internet things and, if they ever desire, will install all extra bells and whistles as extensions. No need to agree to any EULA either (remember, that it was added to Firefox?). And, the best part, all existing users will still keep using the same old Firefox version, no surprises for them. Now, I assume that someone will tell me, that this version already exists and is called ESR :)
For example at the moment multi-account containers is a plugin. I needed it and installed the plugin and it's fine.
It kind of sucks that this isn’t a core feature of the browser, but the AI stuff will be. At least Firefox sync is good enough to sync extensions.
Firefox should be a browser, period. It should render pages. All other features should be extensions.
That would've been possible if they didn't kill XUL.
That's silly. It's still entirely possible as there are plenty of great extensions that don't require XUL and Firefox, which is still almost entirely XUL, can be hacked on locally to reduce surfaced features all the way down to a window with an addressbar and nothing else by examining that XUL and using userChrome.css to alter it.
If Firefox is just a browser, it will not get any money.
I'm pretty sure ESR is a different thing, but yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think it even should be relatively easy, insofar as that a lot of the non-base functionality is in built-in extensions?
Average Joe or Joan will install some crap AI assisted browser if some idiot in Tiktok or FB says follow me and I will DM you a special link to get baby-clothes for -10% discount. Hope your family is not that. My spouse despite reading HN etc thinks that anyway privacy is lost - so why notget at least that 10% discount.
Another problem for Mozilla:
- If they don't pivot to AI people will leave it. Yes, some hardcore RMS fans will use some clone of Firefox - all others will not
- If they adopt modern AI people scream
- Same happened when Mozilla accepted DRM (for Netflix etc). Many tech writers, commentators were against that. But if Firefox did not adopt it then all those tech writers would have used Chrome to see Netflix. No one of these commentators say they will boycott Netflix.
Have it as a stand alone plugin.
I should have to manually install this AI stuff.
Forcing everything into a plug-in is architecturally more complex, and less performant... I'm imagining proxying from native code through JavaScript APIs, then back to native code for LLM operations and context storage. But might lead to creation of some new AI extension APIs.
Then ship a FireFoxAI browser for users who want it.
Forcing everyone to by default use AI isn't freedom. I might as well just use Chrome.
So now we're debating compile-time feature flags vs run-time, and the overhead of running/maintaining multiple build configs. And picking good names for each... "Firefox Pro with AI" vs "Firefox Lite for Engineers". This isn't what Mozilla needs to be focusing on right now, imo.
With over 600 million in revenue they can afford to put up a different page for Firefox AI.
A large percentage of users, particularly Firefox users , don't want this AI stuff built in.
Where does this AI even run. Does it have to make an API requests to send all of the webpages I view somewhere else ?
Is it even my computer anymore, my browser, or am I sharing it with people who want to extract more money from me.
As is Google forced me to view often incorrect AI summaries when I have no interest in them.
Do I want the only real Chrome competitor to also force bad ai content in my face ?
Is it using AI if you don't click on the feature's related button? AFAIK when I choose to translate a page or a selection it only starts working when I do it.
The team (AND Marketing) should focus on saying it's a fast core browser with the extensions you want to make it yours.
Have recommended extension sets ([uBlock, Sponsorblock], [Containerise, Sideberry, Decentraleyes], [AI translation + Dictionary/Thesaurus]).
Make me want to use your AI features, don't just slap them on my face wishing I'll do more than get mad and try to get rid of them.
This. My browser should be a browser and nothing more. If I want more, I should be able to use an add-on. Stop baking everything in out of the box.
Language models are not like the Classic Theme, which can be relegated to an extension (now defunct).
Language models are like Hello, Pocket, and Sync. Core browser features one and all that must silently run by default unless explicitly disabled.
Sync is the only feature you listed which is arguably a core feature, in that it makes sense to build into the browser to be able to sync as much of the browser's settings and data as possible for the user. Everything else --- Hello, Pocket, and LLMs --- can and should sink or swim as extensions which the user must seek out and install if they provide sufficient value.
You won't find much relating to Pocket or Hello in the OSS project. I predict a lot of the new AI functionality will stay out too. So not core functionality.
You're not a normal user of Firefox then.
Normal users will be fine if they will see two big squares side by side as an installation step: „with AI“ and „without AI“, where the former will just install and enable the plugin. Explicit choice is better than opt-out, and it’s not going to be something people frequently change their mind about, so another switch can be buried in settings.
Firefox has <5% of browser share, no one is a normal user of firefox.
Was actually looking for somebody mentioning this bit. Admittedly, one of the few regular Firefox users. Yet, as a regular Firefox user, this much ranting about something that can be turned off with a click, is kind of annoying. The stuff that's been added so far ("Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points", "Solo AI Website Creator", "Sidebar AI chatbot") is incredibly easy to disable. Been in advanced, beta, dev releases for a while.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...
I've been a normal user of Firefox for over 20 years.
Who is a "normal" user.
Normal users install Chrome.
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
That's how normal users stay on chrome while your users leave firefox. That's how you get no users at all.
Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.
Potential users are not users, and firefox can't be that browser. Actually that browser is brave, and it also doesn't have hundred of millions of users. You can't fight defaults browsers, people don't care.
I don't get this dark/pessimistic/Firefox's so done view many people love to harp. Do we want Firefox to return, or to die? We should decide and act accordingly.
Telling Firefox to not to move and get out of the place where it currently is a great contradiction in itself.
Many potential Chrome users were not users, and now they are. You can change public opinion by putting your money where your mouth is, and being persistent about it.
Also, let's not forget that Firefox is kinda preventing itself being detected via standard mechanisms so global analytics show its numbers a bit low than the reality, as well.
Many potential Chrome users were not users, and then android happened. I'll believe firefox has a shot to become mainstream when they do something similar. Until them, keep your users or alienate them and disappear.
I'll agree to disagree here and will leave to get a fresh mug of coffee.
Unless we meet in another thread, merry Christmas and happy new year in advance.
I should have to manually install this bookmarks stuff.
I should have to manually install this search bar stuff.
I should have to manually install this FTP client stuff (okay that last one is the case)
Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
> Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
"All AI features will also be opt-in"
He said there would be both an "AI kill switch" but that it's also "opt-in". Taken together, his two statements seem a little...odd.
People are already getting worked up about being prompted to opt into a new feature on update (even if that prompt is hidden behind an icon that doesn't do anything until the user clicks it), so it's not inconceivable that the kill switch just disables those opt-in prompts for AI-related features.
I guess that just means that there will be a number of AI related features you can choose to select but if at some point you want it all gone you just hit the checkmark Disable all AI.
They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
to pump adoption number. it is well known that adoption rate is much higher when people are forced to opt-in be default.
because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine
Mozilla shouldn't need to worry about adoption numbers though.
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
Don't need to run studies to understand that.
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
Because if this browser will have zero appeal to wider public it will die and you will have to pick between Chrome forks.
Yes, that’s the intent of the argument. If it’s so valuable , people will find it, talk about it, amd it’ll spread on its merits.
Because money! Seriously that's the answer to most of these questions.
Is there a business model behind actually making profit off this stuff yet? Last I looked, Mozilla is still making almost all their money from Google.
The new CEO said he views it as a monetization source. I'm not really sure how, but he apparently has something in mind I can't think of.
The chatbot can provide sponsored responses. Not sure how evident those will be, but I think it will happen. Surely is in Google's mind.
If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.
Huh. Somehow I'd thought those programs were platform level and not item level. Which, yeah, does explain the problem a lot more clearly.
There are other ways to monetize. For instance small local AI models by default with option to pay to use faster/more efficient AI models remotely.
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
https://mullvad.net/en/browser
I still don't want to use an "AI browser". I don't want to use a browser where all or most development effort goes into "AI features" that I need to disable. I want a browser where the development effort goes into making it better at browsing the web.
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Zen, Waterfox, Librewolf, Floorp.. For android there's Fennec, Iceraven.
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
Zen and Floorp are not obvious improvements from a privacy and control perspective.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
For Android, Ironfox is currently the best option IMO.
My preference is Zen (https://zen-browser.app/), but there's also LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) if you want a less customized fork.
I moved to Zen but have subsequently moved to Glide [0] which I find to have less UI fluff and the keyboard shortcuts and scriptability are excellent.
0. https://glide-browser.app/
Pocket has been gone for awhile now. Is it really that hard to uncheck some boxes to turn this all off?
Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser and PaleMoon browser (a modern browser, though it doesn't support webextensions).
Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
What was your methodology in checking? I got different results using a local mitmproxy on a clean install.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
Thanks for the link - I see it's not that much more than Waterfox.
Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.
I don't use firefox so I can't confirm, but one issue might be 15+ (?!) different config settings needed to disable AI and it still won't go away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095873
That's a UX issue, but I keep hearing complaints about privacy.
Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
> Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
I have no idea whether any of the AI features require explicit setup vs. automatically use a paid-for API somewhere.
But it also doesn't matter, because that's the kind of distinction that I've seen go back and forth elsewhere.
OK, to be frank, it seems like people are needlessly crazy paranoid.
I agree with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316763
278 comments, many very angry, and no one can clearly articulate how privacy is being compromised because of the AI features.
On a project whose source is available.
Insane.
Look, it's pretty simple: A bunch of companies have been shoving AI into their products without a lot of consideration for what their users actually want and need. This is a signal for current and future actions that are user-hostile, both directly involving AI and in general (indicative of their current mentality).
"Open source" doesn't help when it's a huge project and users aren't actively auditing all of the changes. (And in general we want to trust the developers; if you're having to audit all features, trust has already been lost.)
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
Local translation of websites so you don't have to tell Google about all the sites you want to read that are not in your language. Firefox's address bar that learns what you type most often and moves those items higher in the autocomplete list. There are plenty of great cases for AI very tightly integrated in the browser. That you haven't thought very hard about it or even bothered to see what AI Firefox has already had for ages (Awesomebar was about 15 years ago) is precisely why you don't "get it."
Local translations?
Is it just as easy to make an extension that runs a local AI translation model? Translation would benefit from having a community continuously updating and tuning local models for languages.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
I had a translation extension for a good 2 years before it was built into FF
You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.
I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
Sounds like a great plugin.
It should be a plugin. Anything that isn't directly related to the core mission of a web browser should be a plugin.
Browsers don't do plugins any more. Firefox hasn't had NPAPI for almost a decade.
How about we don't enable AI features by default in the first place?
If they want to position themselves with a point of difference from competitors, they could provide a settings list of AI features with check boxes for each.
This would tap into the insight that not everyone dislikes the same AI features. For many AI isn't a dirty word, but rather they've seen plenty of examples where it's simply annoying or over-taxing resources.
For example some like AI to build a quick reference summary from a set of web results, but don’t want a full agenic-style AI to extend beyond that.
This could potentially entice users not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and maybe even make a few converts.
I think Firefox is an excellent browser. Their problem is simply that they have too much revenue for too many years. They need a fraction of that. If I were the ceo, I would drastically cut back operations. Scale down the org to 10% of its current strength, keep shipping a solid and boring browser, accept donations that directly support development of the browser. No fads, no ai, just a high performance, bug free, standards compliant browser. The users and donations will come. Firefox will survive. One year of google revenue can kar them for 10 years of lean operation!
Revenue is good for the company - and they'll want as much as possible in order to support their obligations to the business plan, but unfortunately layoffs were still part of that plan these past few years. Mozilla's CEO pay:
2018: $2.46 million
2020: $2.97 million
2021: $5.59 million
2022: $6.90 million
2023: $6.26 million
I block requests to Mozilla infrastructure, not by mistake.
Internet economy already made a full circle with this once before: at first, ads existed to sell things online for advertisers, and make money for publishers (also as a machine for circular deals to propel stock valuations, during the dotcom boom). Then they became so pervasive and annoying that eventually they just became a method of making user experience worse, and get paid for ad-free, thus making money. Today, no one cares about performance of those ads, they are just a replacement of "nag screens" of the shareware era.
It sounds like AI will made this circle a lot faster.
Doesn't matter?
https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU?si=U6fCphjmGcNMb5ac
Until they change this back they are not trustworthy at all.
I'll never understand why people feel so strongly about features like this and that they have to be opt-in.
I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?
The bookmarks feature doesn't silently connect to their servers in the background to function.
The supposed local-only features like translations will download at least model updates and configuration, which leaks metadata.
> I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in?
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
I hope Zen disables this by default, or completely removes it if that’s an option.
Such features should be disabled by default, but as a user of Zen, I really hope it'd be possible to enable AI features.
Firefox had options for many things, until those options were removed
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS.
1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail
- domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com
- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism
- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform
2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features
- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes
- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones
- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.
3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras
- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.
- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.
- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe
- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services
- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux
- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management
4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots
- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons
- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape
5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
I don't really care so much about that. I worry more about the CEO speaking about blocking adblockers like it's a normal business decision. Wtf
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
I would pay $100 a year for a Firefox that just focused on privacy and was competitive speed and features (at rendering) with chrome.
Perhaps, but I would guess 99% of what few users they still have would not do this.
This leaves Mozilla in a tough spot of taking its main competitors' cash instead.
This would be useful for many people who want to avoid AI features being forced on them by every piece of software imaginable. Hopefully, a centralized kill switch like this will also make it easy for Firefox forks such as Zen and Floorp to let users enable AI features if they want to without changing about:flags.
This was made clear when they talked about this previously but once again people don't want to hear that and instead want to rant about AI. The only thing stopping Firefox is its own users.
i don't even want the code present on my machine, only being held back by a checkbox that may or may not be correctly respected. this is what extensions we invented for.
its funny how multi-account containers is a such a killer feature of firefox (that none of the other browsers are able to implement, as far as i remember) but its kept as an extension and they never seem too bothered about promoting it either
Yeah the option is called Waterfox, Palemoon, or even Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is not open source. Not quite an option.
https://vivaldi.com/source/
I think the UI code is not open source (so you can't build the browser yourself).
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
Wait, what? Vivaldi is open source? Now I am confused and really not sure what was the reason I ignored it for so long. Was there something iffy with Linux desktop integration?
It is not open source. Some of the backend is.
Quite surprised at Vivaldi. Considered that as Opera spiritual successor including any possible feature, will've been one of the first browsers adding AI.
Didn't even know Firefox was planning on adding AI features. I wonder how much more bloated it'll be.
How about disable them by default or I switch browsers to something else?
after the disaster of comms from the new ceo, this is really great to see.
I am out of the loop, but what AI features does Firefox offer these days?
When a company has monopolistic practices, its products ride their anticompetiveness to majority market share by force of their dominance. The result is the Netscapeification of anything that competes with any monopoly. A monopoly anticompetitiveness needs to be dealt with powerfully by Congress to increase competition. Though the lobbyists of these anticompetitive companies and the billions deployed from the lobbying companies effectively is a significant detriment to competitors, healthy competition, and always in many subtle, loss of innovation ways, the consumer. This is the tip of the iceberg for anyone in competition to the oligarchical status quo that is in effect, and detrimenting the consumer in multitude ways that you are not comprehending.
When a company has monopolistic practices, its products ride their anticompetiveness to majority market share by force of their dominance. The result is the Netscapeification of anything that competes with any monopoly. A monopoly anticompetitiveness needs to be dealt with powerfully by Congress to increase competition. Though the lobbyists of these anticompetitive companies and the billions deployed from the lobbying companies effectively is a significant detriment to competitors, healthy competition, and always in many subtle, loss of innovation ways, the consumer. This is the tip of the iceberg for anyone in competition to the oligarchical status quo that is in effect, and detrimenting the consumer in multitude ways that you are not comprehending.
Where's the kill switch to remove AI from development?
Honestly this should've been introduced with the new AI Features from the start, it's just shipping slightly too late to fully regain my trust.
get your non AI versions here while they last:
Index of /pub/firefox/releases/
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
A LITTLE HELP:
How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?
https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...
Can I ./configure it completely out?
maybe they should have an option to enable it instead? i don't want this being the default
Oh, this is great news!
better add a button to *enable* AI
Firefox has AI features?? wth
The problem with the "Trust me bro." stuff is that it only works if you are trusted and after the last decade Mozilla is anything but.
None of the big browsers can be trusted at this point. Firefox is at best the least worst out of the big cross platform browsers.
....until it doesn't.
[dead]
> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I thought this rule only applied to users commenting with each other, didn't know it applied to posted content too.
I love threads about Mozilla. New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Mozilla has a recurring problem with being unable to provide the simple, obvious right answer.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
I use Firefox on Android perhaps entirely because it supports uBlock Origin and my other extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
On a different tack, I feel like I went out of my way to use Firefox (and Firefox Focus) on iOS and was thankful they had them during a time where everything had to use the safari renderer. IIRC Firefox Focus even had an ad-block extension that worked on safari
Firefox / Focus (like all browsers on ios) actually uses the "Safari renderer" (WebKit) because Apple doesn't allow any other browser engine on ios.
Historically yes, but in some areas like the EU there have been some regulation changes in 2024 where theoretically there could be alternate browser engines on iOS but in practice it hasn't happened yet. See https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
I would agree that it's probably significant. But it's probably not so high that a non-extensions-enabled Firefox for Android wouldn't be useful.
I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.
According to Mozilla's own stats, most Firefox users do not have any extensions at all:
> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.
> December 8, 2025
> 45.4%
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Note that language packs are counted as extensions.
Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.
(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
Always appreciate people citing real data! I honestly would not have been able to guess one way or the other but unfortunately most comments are kind of hip firing in random directions that are impossible to keep track of, so it helps to keep these discussions grounded.
But what if you weigh this by usage time? The firefoxes without extensions might be hardly ever used
I you can’t take the time to install a new tool. You don’t need it. And I think that’s a great mindset to have with not just software, but when approaching life.
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
Why do you use 1password on non-phone devices?
> Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
I can put up with a lot of friction and cruft as long as the foundations are solid amd I feel a product is moving in the right direction. I moved off chrome when it became crystal clear that Chrome was not even pretending to compete on User experience anymore, even in it is still the best browser in some regards.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
110% on all counts.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
There is a difference between "FYI, we're rejecting a ton of money for us, that's how serious we are about not selling out" and "We ran the numbers, and on balance, taking these 30% more money doesn't seem like the right thing to do because it would be against our stated mission statement".
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.
Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...
Alright, I looked at the hierarchy; I believe that
> But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
qualifies as name-calling.
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
>If you build a userbase out of power users
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
Amen.
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
I am fine with it being a disable-button, as long it's persistent once set.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
They don't do that for any feature, no reason they'd do it for AI.
New CEO could change that.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
When you have a position in the project called "CEO" and that person has the ability to hand down edicts of what he or she sees the project as being, that's when you get into trouble, especially in free software. We've seen this way of developing software co-opted by major companies who have turned otherwise good projects - Chromium and AOSP immediately come to mind - into vendor lock-in and spyware by some suit who has been told he needs to create value.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
>Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
He didn't say he wasn't going to remove ad blockers; he said "I don't want to". No commitment or position, just a preference.
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
Trust takes a lifetime to build, and a moment to break. Those “moments” are becoming more of streams of time these days.
How many times does a scorpion need to sting the frog for the frog to be justified in being wary of “ I definitely won’t sting you this time!”
Except Firefox is a better browser now than it ever was.
Sounds like robust criticism is having an effect. Why would you not be happy with the situation?
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
This seems like a cultural mismatch more than anything. Mozilla makes software that human people use and human people use normal language rather than avoiding the non-profitable aggravation associated with emotive language that a company employee might be used to.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
It's not a good point. One year from now, every browser is going to be an "AI browser". If Firefox will make it harder to use features that are expected of every browser, it will lose. This is akin to saying that JavaScript should be opt-in. If you want to disable these things, you're clearly a power user, and you should at least be comfortable with clicking "Edit" and then "Settings".
The anti-AI people think they are in the majority. They could be, but I suspect that's not the case. I would be surprised if many in the anti-AI crowd could even point to the specific features of the devices and software they use daily that fall under the "AI" umbrella. Meanwhile, regular people are increasingly turning to chatbots instead of search engines. It seems clear we are at peak hype, but this stuff is here to stay.
Have they come out and said what personal data they are selling yet? They were awfully guarded about what they were selling and to who.
I guess we shouldn't worry though, just some random law thought that what they were doing was "selling personal data" but we shouldn't think that it was. No further explanation required.
It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.
> Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu.
This is not true, and is easily verifiable for yourself.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
The vast majority of Firefox usage is on Windows.
I am surprised. Does that imply most GNU/Linux users go out of their way to install Chromium actually? Ubuntu and Firefox have a similar market share.
No idea about most Linux users, but here's what little we know for sure:
Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current
Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium
Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium
snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
The usual package for Firefox on Debian is `firefox-esr`. 44.18%.
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox-esr
The `firefox` package is only in `unstable` and thus installing it requires jumping through hoops.
I agree, but there's nothing more frustrating than another niche user group imagining that the reason for this failure is Mozilla lacking to address their obscure requests, while Mozilla's real goal is to create a browser for everyone. The truth is that this goal is borderline impossible, and all these double standards (can't count the times I've heard "I'm tired of Firefox, moving to Chrome!") surely aren't helping.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome
Just saving this comment here for the future, so when he does it in 2 years I can come back and rub it in
The fact they need to add an “AI kill switch” is the problem.
Because they're already reneged on past promises. Trust is gone.
so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy
[citation needed]
Citation for what really? That the anti-AI movement is a minority? Just ask around you "have you used AI today?" and I'm pretty sure you'll see what I mean. I don't have a horse in this game and I'm not an AI fan, but the numbers speak for themselves so much that the mere question is odd.
The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.
True, and a reasonable PM will ignore both the anti-AI and the AI-in-everything groups.
We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
> the numbers speak for themselves
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
... because Mozilla doesn't pay any attention to them?
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
The solution for the (as of yet) small group of people who cares about these things is very simple: community driven forks.
With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.
These include:
Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/
Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/
Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/
Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
Unfortunately the more interesting ones use Chromium. I wish Zen was better developed and less "aesthetic", it might be worth a shot.
No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it.
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
>and if you default to "no" without asking people even once
I'm still waiting for the polls and statistics and feature requests of this. The "without asking" is the primary problem.
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500918701463
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
> It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around
How about "Translate" button?
What about it? If it's output is generated by the manipulation of tensors and weights, it doesn't belong in my browser. It's not there to because I need to browse, it's there because I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me. I could feed those network responses right into a separate, non-browser app and have it translate stuff for me, if I wanted. Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
> Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses. It really is that easy.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
> lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses.
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
lol
whatever you say
Make it a compile-time option
correct opinion
Can we please stop calling LLMs "AI"? It's obvious now that there is no intelligence here and no trying to make it talk to itself and call is "reasoning" is not the answer.
Nope, it's too late. It sounded stupid when they called it AI in the start, but now AI means something like "tools that can perform tasks that typically requires human faculties to complete". Just like a computer does more than compute, words change meaning, sometimes influenced by marketing.
what i hate most about this (and the discussion happening in the comments), is that nobody is even defining "AI". "artificial intelligence" is not a technical term. what is mozzila doing exactly? what does it mean to put AI in the browser?
There is kind of software that is created using techniques very different from the techniques used to create the vast majority of socioeconomically-important software until about 4 years ago. We need a name for this thing that definitely exists in reality and definitely differs from software created the traditional way. That name is AI. We're probably going to keep on calling it that even if lots of people protest that having "intelligence" in the name is misleading or erroneous.
I don't understand why it's so difficult (impossible?) with Firefox to use your own private AI server (that's not running on localhost). With Brave it's pretty easy.
The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry
There are two things to note here:
1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,
2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.
A bonus third :D
3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!