I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
manualdousuario.net
manualdousuario.net
Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.
Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.
We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a "super-online bubble"
They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.
This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
Mmm, summarized garbage.
>Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books
This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however. Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.
I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
Recipe pages full of fluff.
Review pages full of fluff.
Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion.
> And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?
You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is this a real question?
I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict its result to a single web page.
The opportunity cost of "missing out" on reading a page you're unsure enough about to want a summary of is not likely to be high, and similarly it doesn't matter much if you end up reading a few paragraphs before you realise you were misled.
There are very few tasks where we absolutely must have accurate information all the time.
However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an accurate summary but because i come across some overly long article that i do not even know if i'm interested in reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or not.
For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct, just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect, the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd do without the summary anyway since because i need to run my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in already biased against reading.
How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?
To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article. And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the article says from a headline.
So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are correct enough for the purpose they serve.
Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there become slop, does any of this matter?
I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.
The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
So grab ollama and your prefered model.
Install openwebui.
Connect openwebui to ollama
Then in firwdox open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
I think its technically experiemntal, but ive been using this since day one with no issue
So grab ollama and your prefered model, install openwebui.
Then open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
literally googles first hit for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/jkw62b/i_developed...
I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but can fuck off otherwise
Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though
I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)
Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others.
When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word.
Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
You don't actually state whether you believe Parakeet is susceptible to the same class of mistakes...
I haven't seen those issues myself in my usage, it's just a suggestion, no need to be sarcastic about it.
Your point about the caption language is probably right though. It's worse with jargon or proper names, and worse with non-American English speakers. If we they don't even get right all the common accents of English, I have little hope for other languages.
The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot." But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)
Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less about how it's structured.
Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube includes a human-provided translation as captions. Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up entirely.
It does seem to do a few clever things. For lyrics it seem to first look for existing transcribed lyrics before making their own guesses (Timing however can be quite bad when it does this). Outside of that, AI transcribed videos is like an alien who has read a book on a dead language and is transcribing based on what the book say that the word should sound like phonetically. At times that can be good enough.
(A note on sound quality. It not the perceived quality. Many low res videos has perfectly acceptable, if somewhat lossy sound quality, but the transcriber goes insane. It likes prefer 1080p videos with what I assume much higher bit-rate for the sound.)
and here's Jeff Geerling 15 months ago showing how to use Whisper to make dramatically better captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M9NOtusM8
I assume Google has finally put some of their multimodal LLM work to good use. Before that, they were embarrassingly bad.
It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md
Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?
Audio models tend to be based more on convolutional layers than Transformers in my experience.
Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it’s indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more important question is how these things are used in the UX. Decoders don’t have to be annoying, that is a product choice.
Subtitles are good zo
What people want is something that is better than nothing, and in that sense I can see how automatic captions is transformative in terms of accessibility.
These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.
Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.
I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.
That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
Wow, you are an optimist. I do feel "it's close", but I wouldn't bet this close. But I wouldn't argue either, I don't know. Also, when it really pops, the consequences will be more disastrous than the bubble itself feels right now. It's literally hundreds of billions in circular investing. It's absurd.
FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does.
So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an inaccurate term because it's not. That's exactly what we are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to describing the implementation, and, honestly, what difference does it make for most people using it.
It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high level in most contexts.
What I definitively don't want, yet it's what is currently happening, is a chatbot crammed into every single app and then shoved down your throat.
Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
Just to push their annoying google assistant
Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them.
The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans.
If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone.
That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
You're completely correct, that's fair criticism. The excitement made me skip the basics. Here's a quick breakdown:
What it does: It's a new optimization algorithm that finds exceptionally good solutions to the MAX-CUT problem (and others) very quickly.
What is MAX-CUT: It's a classic NP-hard problem where you split a graph's nodes into two groups to maximize the number of edges between the groups. It's fundamental in computer science and has applications in circuit design, statistical physics, and machine learning.
How it works (The "Grav" part): It treats parameters like particles in a gravitational field. The "loss" creates an attractive force, but I've added a quantum potential that creates a repulsive force, preventing collapse into local minima. The adaptive engine balances these forces dynamically.
Comparison: The script in the post beats the 0.878... approximation guarantee of the famous Goemans-Williamson algorithm on small, dense graphs. It's not just another gradient optimizer; it's designed for complex, noisy landscapes where Adam and others plateau.
I've updated the README with a "Technical Background" section. Thanks for the push—it's much better now.
You can disable AI in Google products.
E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.
> Important: By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
(same source as in grandparent comment).
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI to move around after the document is opened. The other day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is that I can get an ID card with an online account... not the various plan deductibles or anything useful like that.
I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want a summary instead of generating it automatically.
All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about
> The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago.
> Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-o... (Food consolidation)
https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-cont... (Media consolidation)
https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilitie... (US electric utilities)
https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture consolidation)
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)
I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI every frickin' day and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate. [2]
I'd really like to see Mozilla move anywhere but the bay area, whether that is Dublin or Denver. When you aren't hanging out with "big tech" people at lunch and after work and when you have to get in a frickin' airplane to meet with those people you might start to "think different" and get some empathy for users and produce a better product and be a viable business as opposed to another out-of-touch and unaccountable NGO.
[1] Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma that companies like Kodak and Xerox die because they are focused on the needs of their current customers who could care less about the new shiny that can't satisfy their needs now but will be superior in say 15 years. Now we have The FOMO Dilemma which is best illustrated by Windows 8 which went in a bold direction (tabletization) that users were completely indifferent to: firms now introduce things that their existing customers hate because they read The Innovator's Dilemma and don't want to wind up like Xerox.
[2] we use Firefox because we hate that corporate garbage.
(1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip something bad in)
(2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly revenue"
(3) same for having a cookie banner
Seems like maybe forking it in an agreeable way, and funding an EU crew to do the needful with the goal of upstreaming as much as possible.
I don't have insight into EU investments but that would provide a lot of bang for their euros.
(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)
Regulation.
some weeks if its slow he may struggle to make his rent for his apartment; he doesn't have time or capacity to engage in serious rent-seeking behavior.
but hair cut chains like Supercuts are absolutely engaging in shady behavior all the time, like games with how solons rent chairs or employing questionably legal trafficked workers.
and FYI turns out that Supercuts a wholly owned subsidiary of the Regis Corporation, who absolutely acquires other companies and plays all sorts of shady corporate games, including branching into other markets and monopoly efforts.
But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.
Not once in the history of tech “the free market” has succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots of money from doing something they want.
2. AI could be the next technology revolution
3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor
4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind
5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment
6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature
7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically
Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP.
So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
Similar to how I read about a bar in the UK that has an intentional Faraday cage to encourage people to interact with people in the real world.
That's the core issue. No one wants to fail early or fail fast anymore. It's "lets stick to our guns and push this thing hard and far until it actually starts working for us."
Sometimes the time just isn't right for a particular technology. You put it out there, try for a little bit, and if it fails, it fails. Move on.
You don't keep investing in your failure while telling your users "You think you don't want this, but trust us, you actually do."
I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Salesforce and Adobe want to advance an agenda other than selling product and giving their C-suite nice bonuses.
I think you can explain a lot of this as:
1. Executives (CEOs, CTOs, VPs, whatever) got convinced that AI is the new growth thing
2. AI costs a _lot_ of money relative to most product enhancements, so there's an inherent need to justify that expense.
3. All of the unwanted and pushy features are a way of creating metrics that justify the expense of AI for the C-suite.
4. It takes time for users to effectively say "We didn't want this," and in the meantime a whole host of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers have gotten promoted and/or better gigs because they could say "we added AI" to their product.
There's also a herd effect among competing products that tends to make these things go in waves.
If we didn't have pervasive telemetry, we also wouldn't have these obnoxious nudges; UX teams would get their feedback from QA testing and focus groups, and leave the end users in peace.
Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.
I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7 IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar, that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting, continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS, etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare. They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and convenient as mac + iOS.
Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world where they make their cash.
Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as something you interact with directly all together and make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means.
I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have made.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice these two are currently inextricable; if there's AI in the product, then it will be pushed / impossible to turn off / take resources away from actual product improvement.
Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and the things needing to prove themselves to get to real sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff is while they don't tell the market how few people actually chose to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a metric when it was pushed on them.
I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better.
I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.
If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out.
Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.
As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)
https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”
Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've been hubris.
Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so. So many of the choices they made were needlessly user hostile (e.g. real name requirements) that it seems like they assumed it would be a given that people would want to use it. When they later realized their error they tried to cram it down everyone’s throats with stuff like YouTube comments only working from Google Plus accounts.
I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence you think you're not wrong. :)
At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as it proved to be.
I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same time, eg with circles).
(Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.
Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid take and an engaging comment.
I'm trying to remember all of the crap integrations with the likes of Youtube that were pushed. Just, screw that stuff. And quit trying to make yet another new messenger app!
Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+] logins. That rubbed me the wrong way.
Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different "circles" of friends. It sounded very complicated and I was worried that I'd publish something snarky to the wrong group of friends :)
I wonder how many others had the same concern? Given that Steve Yegge accidentally published one of his rants to the public that was meant purely for internal Google consumption (I think that was on G+ ...?) that might have been a legit thing to be wary of.
There was also the very minor annoyance of G+ taking over the + operator in Google search (previously you could say +keyword instead of "keyword" to force literal search), but I don't think that would have swayed me against joining.
If you can’t solve the chicken and egg problem of engagement then nothing else really matters.
I never used any of its collaboration features, just looked at them. I did use it as a friendly-for-non-geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST. And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was cheap and light and worked).
The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites feel even more special, etc...
Google Wave had no existing standard to leverage, making it 100.00% useless if you couldn't invite EVERYBODY you needed to collaborate with. But you couldn't! You weren't allowed! They had to wait for an invite. Days? Weeks? Months? Years!? Who knows!
There was a snowball's chance in hell that this marketing approach could possibly work for a collaboration tool like Google Wave, but Google knew better. They knew better than every journalist that pointed this obvious flaw out. They knew better than every blog post, Slashdot commenter, etc...
It was one of the most spectacular failures caused by self-important hubris that I've ever seen in any industry.
https://www.newschoolers.com/news/read/Got-Google-Wave-Invit...
https://bolesblogs.com/2009/10/13/get-your-google-wave-invit...
https://googlewaveinvites.weebly.com/
And so on: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+wave%22+%22invites...
ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.
Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.
I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.
Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.
[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.
You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.
So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.
But now I’ve got several bugs (and I’m on last years flagship), liquid glass is ugly until you change a guy of settings, and I find myself accidentally triggering something (usually Siri) and being annoyed more.
And this is why the subscription model just doesn’t make sense for most businesses. I pay for a newspaper subscription because there is literally a brand new newspaper each day. A magazine subscription yields an entirely new set of articles every month. I pay for subscription access to data that is continuously updated. The subscription model makes sense for a product that is created anew on a regular basis. It doesn’t make sense for most software companies that are producing static software. What they are calling ‘subscriptions’ are really just rentals for their static products that get minimal surface changes to justify the ongoing rent charge. I’d much rather just pay a flat fee for the static software and upgrade it when I’m ready for the new features.
This is especially irritating when, say, you set up a new phone and the app treats you as if you've never used it before.
Really my complaint is anything that covers up content; if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px above or below the page to show me something I’d complain about lot less — but if I had my way anything unwanted that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don’t want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car or truck!)
If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.
Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".
And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)
That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
It's fucking Clippy all over again
And the worst thing is not only is it being pushed, it is being pushed at the expense of UI/UX. No, Google, I don't need 'help to write' or 'to summarize this document'. I can read and write just fine. And the worst thing of all is that you can't turn it off because they'll just move it around every other week.
So, yes, I want AI in "everything".
And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.
In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."
The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common.
I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that.
To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this.
E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.
Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.
But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.
But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.
Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI. Why not provide an extension?
Have you seen usage statistics of AI integrations?
I personally don't like them, but I don't expect that I am a representative user. Nor are the people I know.
Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>
Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.
It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.
That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.
Spoiler: you didn't.
However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat.
Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.
Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them.
There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence.
Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards.
Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!
Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!
I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.
But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.
From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears.
As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.
Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.
I also wouldn’t want to go back to only web search for finding things out. Search engines are generally inferior.
Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.
"How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count"
Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do.
The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.
Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:
1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!
1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.
1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?
2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.
2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.
2020s: AI, AI, AI!
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.
There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.
This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of this I can take.
Most (all?) of it runs locally too
I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in replying.
I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are interesting to me.
I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products by complex conditions.
I want AI in my car to make me safer.
I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of interruptions.
I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have already asked me.
I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate.
I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.
AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.
I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.
in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.
It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts).
It definitely has its place.
I most definitely do.
I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it.
I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".
Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time.
Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.
I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer.
It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.
I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.
I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
AI ad blocking might be nice.
a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance
Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".
I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.
Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
We are a very fucked-up industry.
If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.
We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...
Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.
Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.
And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold?
Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.
> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.
edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.
FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.
How the mighty have fallen.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.
A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
You hit the nail on the head with this one
Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.
> nitpick
> to find faults in details that are not important
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had relevance, and core services like email, search and maps that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS. Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if that unfortunately amounted to nothing.
Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.
So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.
I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.
It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.
In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
The pessimism can get old.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
On the flip side, changing keybinds in Firefox requires forking, but the defaults aren't too bad.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.
I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.
But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."
Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
I think you just answered your own questions.
> I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
I believe the vast majorty of people do not care about their privacy, answering GP's question.
Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]
They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.
1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-uninstall-goog...
They did not not mind the ads, they just didn‘t know there is an easy way to get rid of them
Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO
Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.
But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there
Google is expected to be evil so nobody is disappointed.
It's a pattern we do a lot in many different settings. We help evil flourish when we concentrate on how tarnished a white knight is. It's petty
Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"
Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.
We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.
> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?
No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.
The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote
"It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox."
They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.
Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.
(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)
> Mozilla is not morally trustworthy
I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?
It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.
Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.
All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?
Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.
Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.
Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.
Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.
I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!
I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!
> if not Firefox, who?
Firefox! But run well!
The point of complaining about someone fucking up, or shaming them, is to get them to stop. They're the ones who should be doing good; they're in the position to do so; they know how; their hubris/capture by money/interests/class/ignorance/something is preventing it. They need only listen to solve this problem. And maybe wholesale replace leadership, I dunno. But replacing bad leadership is way easier than writing a new browser for scratch.
(a secondary purpose of complaining is to promulgate good norms to everybody else so that everybody's on the same page about what respectable behavior would look like)
> Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation.
sad to say, I agree.
> They need only listen to solve this problem
To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.
They may be misplacing their hatred for Mozilla, which legitimately deserves the ire.
In the meantime all these conversions accomplish is the sharpening of Google's teeth. Google not only has the capacity to bite but is actively demonstrating that they'll use their teeth.
So why the fuck do we complain about a dog with no teeth while another dog is eating our legs? Let's get our priorities right. Let's talk after we're not being bitten or if that dog starts eating our other leg.
Don't blame developers for management decisions.
Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.
It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.
These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.
You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex
More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f...
I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools.
For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.
Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?
because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.
It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare.
Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations.
It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.
They did a good job with that.
I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.
Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).
Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.
>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries
I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.
Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
Human translation is obviously better, but not by much, especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human.
That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).
The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.
Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)
Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is.
If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.
Before accusing people of not having read TFA maybe you should do some critical thinking yourself.
Currently they've at least got one of the three.
what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.
It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.
I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.
Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off everything Chrome does in that department.
And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.
Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).
In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I find that having a quick chat about a document after reading it is a good way to interrogate my own understanding of the document.
I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future. You've got to walk before you can run.
Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so they're more likely to need it than you.
It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
Not at all, I just think going around seeing if AI fits is the same as going around with a hammer looking for nails. Let the problems lead you to a solution, don't start with "what can we solve with this?"
"You'll have computers in your home, you can look at a schedule or store recipes!" AI is being shoehorned in weird places, it's in the "kitchen recipes" stage where all we can come up with are chatbots. I think it's premature and wasteful, and will cost regular users a lot of money on wasted AI potential simply because these companies have to recoup some of their investment, even at the cost of user experience and utility.
Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.
E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories changed the world.
Sorry guys, but this one is not for you. Unless you go all in on microchips so powerful that they enable local LLMs, but even that seems to be outside of the FOSS competency as it involves hardware, which FOSS doesn't usually touch (with the exception of raspberry pi's and some libre phones)
This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.
Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option.
I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two.
So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying.
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions.
Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.
I think it's unfortunate we got away from that cadence though I'm sure it was for good reasons I don't fully appreciate.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:
Firefox OS: 2013
Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Directory Tiles: 2014
Pocket acquisition: 2015
Firefox Focus: 2015
Cliqz experiment: 2017
"Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)
> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.
> Directory Tiles: 2014
Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.
> Pocket acquisition: 2015
Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?
> Firefox Focus: 2015
Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?
> Cliqz experiment: 2017
That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?
> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.
Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?
Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.
The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).
So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.
> (1) They spend more on browser development now...
Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.
> (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...
This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
> (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).
> (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...
The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
> (5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...
You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
> (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.
You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").
>Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy.
I know you wanted to keep this conversation outside the realm of facts, but that's hard to do when active internet users in 2009 were around 1.77 billion and are now at 5.5 billion, spending in the industry as a whole has exploded, browser complexity has grown to the point that they are effectively mini operating systems, the complexity of the ecosystem of web apis and standards and complexity of security has expanded by orders of magnitude.
Moreover, treating the change in market share like a failure is nonsense in a world where distribution is dominated by OS bundling and defaults. Firefox could double its dev budget and still lose share if Microsoft, Apple, and Google keep leaning on their platform power.
So there are so many levels on which to reject the premise of "spending more to achieve less", which I think it goes to show that measuring these criticisms against the factual record is actually extremely important.
And again, I would reiterate that you're not taking responsibility for voluminous criticisms that are more real than you seem to recognize, which quite literally do suggest that the side bets siphoned away real resources n from software development. You yourself are making a form of that argument, but characterizing it as "distraction", which conveniently can't be measured in development funds or lines of code, but hinges on subjectively judged abstractions (aka vibes) like mind share and "focus".
>This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground.
Unless you think that the dynamics driving Chrome's initial rise in market share stopped being leveraged, the significance of its platform dominance in explaining its market share is every bit true now as it was then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If anything it's only intensified. And again, this is not taking responsibility for the actual criticisms in the forms they have been expressed, which tend to make no such distinction, mention market share collapse explicitly, and omit the rise of Chrome from the story entirely.
>This is a straw man.
I promise you it's not, and if I wanted to be uncharitable I could have emphasized some truly off the charts claims people have made with every ounce of confidence and self-assurance that they spoke on behalf of the Mozilla user base, e.g. conspiratorial suggestions that the nonprofit/corporate subsidiary organization is intended to trick people, that they're manipulating their nonprofit reporting figures, completely sincere but inaccurate attempts to claim that the VPN and Pocket were substantial money sinks, conspiratorial insinuations of quid pro quo cooperation with Google's monopoly, or most amazingly, a categorical claim that Quantum was abandoned rather than finished.
Some of the criticisms, quite forcefully made here on HN, have been that Mozilla ignores feature requests, either generally, or specific ones, like tab customizations, or, in this thread, WebUSB. Everyone dies on a slightly different hill. But they all tie the issue of market share to the issue of "focus" on the browser however quantified. And if you don't think it's a matter of feature development, the logic is equally flawed if you substitute a new preferred term like "core browser". Just like there's no magic feature that restores the market share overnight, there's no such thing as a sufficient threshold of focus on the core browser that achieves that restoration of market share.
>You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism
I think that misreads the balance of emphasis in my comment. I would say my comment was a dispute of the vast majority of ventured criticisms, combined with an acknowledgment of proportionately a small few. There are needles of legitimate criticism buried a haystack of spurious nonsense. I would also suggest it's a bit of a misread in a more important sense, in that I'm attempting to demonstrate a degree of case-by-case reasonableness that contrasts with the one-dimensional nature of criticisms. Both in this thread and in my general experience and defenses of Firefox are even handed and willing to acknowledge criticisms, and that spirit of even-handedness is not reciprocated in criticisms that ever recognize their rhetorical excess. In fact I would argue in this conversation it's being abused in an attempt to leverage it into a confession of a contradiction.
That's not everything, but I think it serves as a representative encapsulation. If you want, pick out whichever point you believe is your strongest unanswered objection, and I'll hear you out, though we might be far enough into this comment tree that HN won't give me the option to reply.
Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.
For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.
Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.
I would if I could!
I don't want my web browser to be a mediocre PDF reader. I want my good and perfected PDF reader to be a PDF reader. I don't want my web browser to be a Web development IDE. I want a specialised (version of) a browser with all the developer tools and one that lacks all these features is lighter, safer and simpler for browsing. I don't want an FTP client in my web browser (I don't want one anywere lol). Firefox was extracted from Mozilla back in the days exactly because Mozilla had become a browser that was bloated and crammed full of features that were unpolished or just subpar. Firefox saved Mozilla and fought back by being lean, fast, and terribly focused at doing one thing and doing talhat well.
I want a browser that's good and forever improving in letting me browse the web and run and use web-apps.
But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.
I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything platform—perhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.
Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.
A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.
You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack
I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.
browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
browser.ml.chat.page set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
browser.ml.enable set to false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
extensions.ml.enabled set to false
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);
It's frustrating that the choice is between "becoming bad" (firefox) and "much worse" (chrome).
And do what? Use a Chromium-based browser, which is infinitely worse?
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.
They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
Signed, a 20 year user.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.
Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in RSS client form Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the ability to save sessions from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in notes from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the tab stacking from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
Not being so weirdly buggy on Windows. It's my main browser but man does it have odd behaviors that need restarts occasionally.
Firefox already has vertical tabs and they work great.
> Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
I'm pretty sure that Firefox has profile switching in some capacity, although I don't personally use it and can't vouch for it.
As for the rest of these, I agree completely. Firefox has too many wacky AI experiments and not enough normal browser features.
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
I just ended up with mounds of rules about what to open in the same container vs not, what urls to force in a given container, etc.
I still want to like them, but TBH, I don't miss them in Vivaldi.
Totally willing to accept I was doing containers wrong, I guess, but in that case, I don't know what "right" would've looked like.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
Maybe I can go back to Zen just to get more layers out of my browser sammich.
Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.
I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.
* I summarize articles.
* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.
* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.
* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.
* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.
Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.
Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.
The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.
As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.
And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.
It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
When companies add additional features to a product I use, I generally want to be notified about them so that I can make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled or disabled.
Zero AI in Firefox - I will compile from source rather than tolerate AI in the browser.
If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)
But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.
It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.
Why would they want AI?
It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.
It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature.
For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.
Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D
WebUSB is great to that end!
In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.
But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.
I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.
Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.
Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.
Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...
The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)
So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.
- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,
- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,
- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),
- and the weights and training code are open,
I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.
E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?
I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.
If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.
Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a lot of people's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it, and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would be a gamechanger.
What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.
I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.
As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M
Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.
So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.
I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.
I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.
Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.
Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.
Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".
As a ChatGPT subscriber I use it more since when I can just open a dedicated sidebar in Firefox with ChatGPT inside.
It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.
People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.
Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.
To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.
Also note that it's browser.ml.enable (no "d") vs. browser.ml.chat.enabled, to make matters even more infuriating.
On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation.
In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced advertising or digital currency for that matter.
My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)
I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it utterly useless.
Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case Mistral).
The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu) hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for gpt, copilot, mistral or even claude and the sidebar just gives an error) but even if they did: what problem do these extra buttons and integrations solve? Am I missing something?
Do note that I would love integration the other way around: to have an AI agent (through an MCP for example) drive my firefox. Safely, contained, etc etc. I am not an AI luddite. I just find the firefox sidebar offering no value at all.
And I think Firefox should step up and become a better alternative to playwright. One geared at developers with tools like profiling, dom-manipulation (basically the Developer Console) assertions, visual comparison etc. Or (and?) one geared towards normal browsing and interacting with webapps.
browser.ml.chat.maxLength
A smarter client would use a tool chain in which the first step is a model that's good at taking large contexts/data and extracting actual content from it. Many sites have a very low S/N ratio (readable content / dom).
Then pass that content, eg markdown, along to a model that's optimized at getting relevant parts out of content for the task at hand.
And only then onto the generic model to "do stuff" with it.
But many clients, including afaiks the Firefox one, just send the entire dom or html along to a generic model.
*Well DuckDuckGo
My ideal would be an additional prompt that says "hey this page content is beyond your context length, fine with extending it to whatever the maximum context length plus some for the model's context length"?
Zed and VS code can now drive a browser. E.g. to perform tasks like "run the site on a local server and verify that you see the counter increase when you click this new plus-button"
You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.
Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).
I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here.
Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and then turning out to be wrong?
Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by Dropbox, the band.
Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.
Edit: shame it wasn't about the band and the song though.
I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.
I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when needed. I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any company that creates a free tool to keep users in their ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?
So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly attached to the old ways.
Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.
Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.
Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.
The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.
Edit: rearranged paragraphs.
Dear god, no. The last thing I want to be doing is telling grandma over the phone how to sweet-talk the settings screen into turning her adblocker back on.
Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.
Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.
So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
And now Firefox.
Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.
I've been test driving Waterfox and at this point I don't think I'll be going back.
Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.
Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension—where I can pick which AI I'm using—then I'm all for it. I'll just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.
NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper grammar-checking AI too. That would be super useful. I'd love that!
Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.
No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual websites, then we would actually be able to use the public internet.
It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though, but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a browser engine.
While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…
It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.
TBF some of these features are also unique and something i cherish when browsing the web (e.g. container tabs). however, the devs must ask why every "new" browser is just a chromium fork in the end.
there should be a try to pivot to the core experience than feature parity to see if it actually brings more people over.
The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.
It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of value.
Whether it will actually do any of those things is another question of course.
I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.
I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.
I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.
The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.
Some great examples are the local translation engine and I believe they also added or are in the process to add a small engine that can describe images and provide caption on-demand, which is a great step towards accessibility.
I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.
I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.
Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.
HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).
The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.
It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue. Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my data the product.
But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share, and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?
Here's some ways I can think of:
- seamless integration with local models
- opt in and opt out experience when needed
- ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)
- ai and accessibility
these are off the top of my head.
it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.
I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and short sighted.
Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!
I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.
Was this intentional or just a complete lack of attention to detail? Even their own screenshot contradicts this.
Does it matter? Yes. "Window AI" suggests there is an AI manager, where as "AI Window" suggests an isolated environment.
Mozilla, you are still on time to reroute your efforts to regain the users you'd lost by crap like this.
Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could affect much more than just privacy.
But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent releases.
You can't be all things to all people.
All other features should come via add-ons.
Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.
Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the current state of “AI” and where it’s headed, the undeniable fact is that “AI” has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has had more than a few over the years).
What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It’s not easy. I’d rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail instead of just being left behind due to inaction.
This assertion is relying on facts not in evidence.
I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a bit more over time.
My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.
Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that when mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI integration in the browser. That at least indicates that the people who are actively following firefox development are substantially against this kind of feature. It's not just "I and the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important subset of firefox power users don't want it.
In other words, the people that are actively going out of their way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based on having access to such things... to which I say... really??? But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who will choose firefox over whatever corporate-captured competitor is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.
Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some other commenters, is that, whether or not people do want this, they shouldn't want it. It is bad for users and for the world to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.
Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on those core products.
I think the author does not speak for me
Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating research sessions, by searching and organizing...
Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.
We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.
Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.
I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.
Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.
Like, what were they thinking?
I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.
If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time ago.
Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might pay for YT if they did that.
> Could Not Give Kudos
>Kudos could not be given to the message for the following reason: > Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed messages per minute.
Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.
It honestly feels like a plague worse than ads. At least ads I can block in various ways.
I can’t roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like “How can agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?”
Fixed that for you greed dbags.
AI = cloud = insecure bullshit
It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if they can invent recognizable deliverables, because the whole chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting / hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from everyone else also pretending.
But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even likes it.
None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so much free money going around. If you have to do an actually good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment, you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress the board/executives/big donors.
The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.
(Probably there are a few other things driving this framework also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as clueless about what makes software good for the users as everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have to to keep their jobs.)
This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS. But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh. And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it and for some reason that works because for mysterious and probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that either.
Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so disappointing.
there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?
I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?
true, but that's not the same as "nobody wants AI"; them fucking it up once shouldn't mean that they should drop the entire idea; by this logic they should stop making browsers altogether
the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu
> local translation is already available
and it's already "AI"
> I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping ...
they already have a "suggest more tabs" thing that does exactly this using a local model; it's insanely slow, low quality, doesn't use gpu, but the idea is nice. I'm hoping they will continue working on it, as managing tabs across multiple windows is not exactly what I want to spend my time on, and it's exactly the type of a problem LLMs are perfect for
> never had issues with ads
it could always be better; there's always a certain amount of sites that either don't work at all or still show ads, and I imagine you could use a local VLM to hide elements based on the actual rendered result; same with cookie banners, annoying sign-in prompts, and so on -- how is this not the coolest thing ever? as long as you have like 8gb (v/u)ram, you could immediately unshittify most of the web
right now we could get a browser that understands what's on the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user experience
I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd rather AI handle it
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers. In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.
Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing to use their browser if you can avoid it.