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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

The question I have is, why should your browser also be the interface to local AI models? Seems totally unrelated to be honest.

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It makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.

But why use the web browser as local interface for it? Why not a separate, native application?

If my data is already in the browser (Sheets, Gmail, other websites to scrape) why have another app instead of doing the work in the browser?

While we're at it, why not shove our financial passwords etc. into our HTTP headers for every website we visit?

That would be awfully convenient. You'd never lose them or need to deal with another native application. Just open any web page that echoes all HTTP headers and then check your account balance.

Or maybe having a separation of concerns for different applications in a general purpose computer is worth the friction.

I don't get it.

You missed the joke

I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. It seems that my information about the poster's intent was outdated or inaccurate.

Upon further research, I have found that I misread the word "unnecessarily".

Web browsers have become to Javascript what Emacs is to Elisp. It is an interactive, extensible, "everything application". The main difference is that right now, just about everyone with a computer uses a web browser.

Personally I prefer to use a separate, dedicated service to run my language models, and I bounce between a few clients for various things. One of them is a (local) web interface (open-webui).

Why does the address bar go to a search engine?

When you use an LLM, you provide it context. Where do you usually get that context from? Some service, JIRA, whatever, in your browser.

For the same reason that a netbook/Chromebook is probably enough for most people: users rarely install native apps on laptop form factors these days - apart from the "essentials" like an office suite, and possibly specific programs they use to get work done (image/video editors etc.).

A browser is one thing that users will go out of their way to replace, making it a pretty attractive vehicle for stuff like this.

Because we consume and interact with so much of our information via browser that it's a natural pairing?

Why does my browser have a PDF reader and print manager built in?

The very things that should ideally be part of an operating system and be called/embedded by the browser as need be?

Browsers are just mini OSs at this point. It’s probably best just to accept it. Honestly in some respects (security, isolation, resource management) they do a better job than the operating system they run on top of.

Opera has been bundling in a mail client, rss reader, calendar app etc for ages now. I also always thought it was weird but Opera people seem to like it, to the point that inspired browsers like Vivaldi also do that.

FYI Vivaldi is run by ex-CEO and co-founder of Opera. =)

Didn't Netscape bundle in a mail client before Opera did?

Netscape had a separate email and html composer application suite in the late 1990s. Opera had it built in along with a torrent client that couldn’t be separated from what I remember in a package that was smaller than almost all feature complete stand alone web browsers from 2003 and onwards.

Something like that. Mozilla used the Netscape code to first create Mozilla Application Suite and then SeaMonkey[1]. It had Mail, IRC chat and a composer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

Yes. 3 years before Opera. Netscape shipped Communicator in June of '97, the suite that added email and calendaring to browsing, based in part on their Collabra groupware acquisition in '96. Opera released v4 in June of 2000, three years later, with its email client.

>Opera has been bundling in a mail client, rss reader, calendar app etc for ages now.

Opera has been bundling stuff like that, even a BitTorrent client, even when they were still a Norwegian owned company.

Sorry? They are Chinese

What I said above. Opera was Norwegian before that. Which part confuses you?

Now they are. Previously, they were Norwegian.

> Opera has been bundling in a mail client, rss reader, calendar app etc for ages now

No longer the case since they switched to Blink. Nonetheless, Opera still comes with more built-in functionality than other browsers, such as ad blocker, in-browser VPN, and builtin ads occasionally.

Save on bandwidth by generating content on the fly rather than having to visit websites which used their own GenAI to generate content without regard for accuracy as its sole purpose is to attract the attention of real humans which can then be sold via a real-time auction run by another AI (Google ads etc.) to the real customers, who are likewise generating advertising with GenAI and testing which works better via another (A/B, multi-armed bandit, or genetic algorithm).

GenAI on the browser skips the intermediaries and probably loads faster than all the JS needed for 1200 analytics "partners" and reinventing the wheel badly by making it load text on the fly based on your scroll position rather than letting the browser handle it because someone just assumed a few thousand lines must be slow and never stopped to try it.

Plus it being local means it might even work when you have no signal.

So I can have an AI summarise the 5000 word essay the author used an AI to write?

No, but I'd like an LLM to filter out comments like yours and delete it before I read it.

:s/yours/this_one/

> why should your browser also be the interface to local AI models?

Opera has historically been a junk drawer of technology. A BitTorrent client. A mail app. A chat app. A web server. There have been innumerable features which were often unnecessary or puzzling. It does not surprise me at all to hear that they're adding local LLM support.

All I need is to do is block more ads.

Maybe if you consider your browser to be your OS.

Opera is an anything-Internet-suite. It's not just a browser, but aims to deliver interfaces for anything else people are doing with browsers. So anything for which most people would use a website or web-extensions, they deliver out of the box. And AI seems to be something that should be integrated deep into such an environment.

Mozilla (the browser) was like that wasn't it? Email, browser etc. and FF was the stripped down version.

Yes, it was called Mozilla Suite or Mozilla Application Suite, and is now named SeaMonkey.

Mozilla was like that because Mozilla was a clone of Netscape Communicator that had been like that since 1997 when Netscape acquired Collabra and turned the standalone browser into a groupware suite with email, calendaring, directory services, and more.

Exactly. You can claim to be the "first" at something very easily this way. Check out my browser, we're the first with an integrated flight simulator!

The browser is the new OS.

Only according to some specific streams of thought within IT. It's not really the mainstream view. That's while apps still exist both on mobile and desktop.

Task automation?

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