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Comment by avazhi | Hacker News Reader

Translate sure.

Image search? I have a search engine for that.

Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it.

Dubbing? Ditto.

Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience life as short blips of everything.

Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place.

So… no thanks.

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Yes, Translate is the only one I want - and we already have that!

The worst is anything that tries to suggest stuff in text fields or puts buttons etc. to try and get you to "rewrite with AI" or any nonsense like that - makes me just want to burn anything like that to the ground.

  > Image search? I have a search engine for that.

I'd use it. Why does it need to be another site? I'd trust Mozilla more than I trust Google. Do you really feel different?

Plus, Search by Image[0] is one of the most popular extensions, with 3x as many people using it as tree-style tabs.

I don't use it but a grammar tool is the next most popular[1], so I could see this being quite a useful feature.

But the other stuff, I'm with you. I like translate but I personally don't care for dubbing, summarizing, or anything else.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetool/

But that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that are already solved by users being able to customise the browser for their own needs.

I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user.

Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.

I mean, Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars and it isn't even close. 'Average' persons don't use Firefox, period - they use Chrome. I dunno when you last looked at browser market share, but Firefox is already extremely niche. Trying to cater to the 'average user' when your entire userbase consists of power users is asinine but Mozilla clearly doesn't understand this. They think it's still 2008 or something.

Do you use Firefox?

If not, why not?

Do normal people use Firefox?

I've successfully migrated my girlfriend, parents, and several friends. Half those friends don't even know how to program. So yes, normal people can use Firefox and they really don't notice the difference.

  > Chrome/Google have already won the browser wars

It isn't over till its over. It's trivial to make a stand in this fight. It is beyond me why a large portion of HN users aren't using FF or one of its derivatives. Of all people they should be more likely to understand what's at stake here...

Yes I use FF. You’ve completely misunderstood my point.

Your comment about how YOU had to get the people close to you to use FF was exactly my point. Techies are the only people who use FF now without it being foisted onto them by their techie friends.

Local RAG on your browsed pages (either automatically, manually or a mix (allow/disallow domains/url) ?

You personally wouldn't use live captions and dubbing, so there's no point building it for the millions of people who need it as an accessibility feature?

They can use addons, but it shouldn’t be built in to the browser. Not all that complicated.

Because of what?

Why it must be addon? Because Ai has negative connotations?

Bloat? Security? Privacy? Larger codebase to maintain? Lack of focus by a Browseer company? Speed?

Live captions and dubbing can be a game changer for:

- non native speakers - moving away from the english-centric web - impaired people

Couldn’t care less about any of that. English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing wrong with that. And subtitles exist already or can be generated by addons. Most people don’t use them. So, once again, maybe don’t inconvenience the vast majority of users for some small subset of the population.

> English is the world’s dominant language and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Based on the fact that you said this I'm going to assume you can't read/write Mandarin, apologies if that's incorrect because that leads to my second assumption which is that you're unaware of the astonishingly vast amount of content and conversation related to open source and AI/ML you're missing out on as a result of not being able to read/write Mandarin.

What does what you wrote have to do with what I wrote, or the comment I was replying to? Literally every reasonably educated Chinese person speaks English as a 2nd language.

I'm missing out on all sorts of shit I'd find interesting by virtue of not being a prodigious polyglot. That fact has nothing to do with English being the global language for literally everything in every domain, nor with the fact that in-browser language translation doesn't require baked-in AI.

Just say that you dont care about other ppl, that's it, lol.

English proficiency is pretty high bar. Thats multi year effort

I mean, sure. I don’t generally give a shit about other people. That’s also not really relevant here. There will always be a dominant language. Currently, it happens to be English and it will remain English into the near future (250+ years). If you attend even a shitty school in a third world country today you are taught English as a second language. Look at the Philippines or sub-Saharan African countries. Everybody speaks English + their native language.

Crying about English’s global penetration is super weird while also being pointless, since it’s a fait accompli at this point.

local LLM assisted 'tampermonkey' userscript generation?

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