Who asked for this? Who wants it? Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd, and they're just about the only ones who are keeping Firefox alive.
If there's anybody from Mozilla or the Firefox dev team in this thread, I'd be interested to hear the thinking behind this addition.
At least the local AI features, being able to translate or summarize a page without sending it off to Google, seem like they'd appeal to this crowd the most.
I don't really understand the article's complaints (like "high cpu & ram usage with firefox local ai features" and "forcing [...] without asking the user") when to my understanding they're something you have to intentionally decide to use and are not using any resources otherwise - unless there's some feature I've missed.
Yes I would like more local translation support! (Faster, better, more languages, sometimes it fails on mobile for unknown reasons). Also Firefox history could use refresh (like suggested here https://community.brave.app/t/improvements-for-browser-histo... and 5 can be AI enhanced)
I have no problem with it announcing new features and asking if I wish to enable them after an update, but I'd really rather prefer it not to force enable new features (regardless of proximity/relevance to AI) whether it tells me about them up front - and especially don't want it to if they aren't even notifying me of it.
That being said, I'm a FF user interested in exploring what LLM features in webbrowsers could bring. I would hate it if lack of them would make me switch to chromium-based browsers. So I'm happy Mozilla is exploring these.
Telemetry should always be opt in not opt out - I don't care how you justify it but especially I don't care when you've marketed yourself with "Firefox is built with privacy and protection as the default."[1]
[1] https://www.firefox.com/en-US/user-privacy/
When it comes to on by default - If what you are doing amounts to "I Am Altering the Deal, Pray I Don't Alter It Any Further." then you might have to ask yourself whether you should be doing it.
They've ALWAYS had the most terrible public-facing messaging. They're diodes, they know what the market wants, and never take feedback. It's why I quit volunteering ages ago.
I'm not thrilled it isn't open source. But it works, it has the best out of the box experience I've seen in any browser, and they don't shove AI features in my face.
Appealing to that crowd is not big enough to grow it's market share from 2%.
Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here? Is your grandma going to think "Wow, Firefox can summarize my emails!" and switch web browsers?
>Do you really think AI features are going to move the needle here?
It's better than doing nothing at least.
Most prominent thing is chat in sidebar. It's iframe + a few shortcuts. Optional, harmless, using zero resources. Actually quite convenient.
Another is perplexity being one of the search providers. This is literally config not code. I wonder how many people actually removed or even looked at the list of the default search providers before that.
I think only real one is ml naming for tabs. Just meh.
Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.
But you could bring up the same argument about vertical tabs, tab groups, Firefox Sync or many other things that interfere with the browser on much deeper level than shortcut to open page in the sidebar.
Is there argument to single out this specific feature apart from "AI bad"?
I'd like to see (opt-in) automatic grouping. The kinda-sorta grouping it does still requires you to manually engage with it.
What made you jump to that conclusion? My guess about someone who's using a non-mainstream browser and figuring out how to configure it to their liking is that they're likely also using AI in more ways than the standard Chat-Webinterface, eg Agents, CLI tools, MCP,... To give an analogy, rolling your eyes over brainrot memes isn't denying the usefulness of smartphones or messengers either. The underlying sentiment is being critical of things that get pushed down our throats through A/B-optimized patterns that ultimately serve other interests than your own, profits or darker.
Please don't compare it to Google or Microsoft products that give you "Enable now/Remind later" or just no option at all.
This is a remarkably useless argument; "any" could be anything whatsoever, for example that the fuzzy logic of some prior AI craze ended up in certain rice cookers, while ignoring that the remaining 99.8881118881118883479075520881451666355133056640625 (or so) percent of AI is some combination of grift, wishful thinking, or both.
How do you propose they finance development if we consider simple integrations with zero privacy or customization impact "selling out"?
They would need to finance a lot less development if they stopped changing things and just worked on maintaining a limited core functionality including a nice extension system. That's it. Most of their "development" over the last 10 years has been a total waste of time.
Can you really say with a straight face, that not doing vertical tabs or chat shortcut would allow them to operate on much smaller budget?
Either way, all I'm saying is when I look at the UI changes that have been made to Firefox over a period of years, I believe their value to me is closer to zero than their development cost is.