Currently they've at least got one of the three.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).
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.