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Comment by clueless | Hacker News Reader

This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI...

[Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

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They are not "wanting" to introduce AI, they already did.

And now we have:

- A extra toolbar nobody asked for at the side. And while it contains some extra features now, I'm pretty much sure they added it just to have some prominent space to add a "Open AI Chatbot" button to the UI. And it is irritating as fuck because it remembers its state per window. So if you have one window open with the sidebar open, and you close it on another, then move to the other again and open a new window it thinks "hey, I need to show a sidebar which my user never asked for!". Also I believe it is also opening itselves sometimes when previously closed. I don't like it at all.

- A "Ask an AI Chatbot" option which used to be dynamically added and caused hundreds of clicks on wrong items on the context menu (due to muscle memory), because when it got added the context menu resizes. Which was also a source of a lot of irritation. Luckily it seems they finally managed to fix this after 5 releases or so.

Oh, and at the start of this year they experimented with their own LLM a bit in the form of Orbit, but apparently that project has been shitcanned and memoryholed, and all current efforts seem to be based on interfacing with popular cloud based AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Mistral. (likely for some $$$ in return, like the search engine deal with Google)

All your complaints can be resolved in a few seconds by using the settings to customize the browser to your liking and not downloading extensions you dont like. And tons of people asked for that sidebar by the way.

We have to put this all in the context. Firefox is trying to diversify their revenue away from google search. They are trying to provide users with a Modern browser. This means adding the features that people expect like AI integration and its a nice bonus if the AI companies are willing to pay for that.

Pay for what? It says it's a local AI model so how will AI companies be giving Firefox revenue from this?

What says that?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot This page not only prominently features cloud based AI solutions, I can't actually even see local AI as an option.

The new AI Tab Grouping feature says it. I've never tried the AI chatbot feature but that makes sense. Would be fun to somehow talk to the local AI translation feature.

For me, the complaint isn’t the AI itself, but the updated privacy policy that was rolled out prior to the AI features. Regardless of me using the AI features or not, I must agree to their updated privacy policy.

According to the privacy policy changes, they are selling data (per the legal definition of selling data) to data partners. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...

This is an absurd take. The meaning of "selling" is extremely broad, courts have found such language to apply to transactions as simple as providing an http request in exchange for an http response. Their lawyers must have been begging them to remove that language for the liability it represents.

For all purposes actually relevant to privacy, the updated language is more specific and just as strong.

If they were only selling data in such an 'innocent' way, couldn't they clearly state that, in addition to whatever legalese they're required to provide?

That's literally exactly what they do. This is why you should consider reading beyond headlines from time to time.

> You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

> (from the attached FAQ) Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

The courts have found providing an http request in exchange for an http response- where both the request and response contains valuable data, is selling data? Well that’s interesting because I too consider it selling of data. I’m glad the courts and I can agree on something so simple and obvious.

> courts have found [that "selling" means] providing an http request in exchange for an http response

No they fucking haven't. Provide evidence for this.

> All your complaints can be resolved in a few seconds by using the settings to customize the browser to your liking and not downloading extensions you dont like

until you can't. Because the option foes from being an entry in the GUI to something in about:config, then is removed from about:config and you have to manually add it and then is removed completely. It's just a matter of time, but i bet that soon we'll se on nightly that browser.ml.enable = false and company do nothing

Firefox has made it so difficult to install and get Tree Style Tabs to work that it feels deliberate.

> Firefox is trying to diversify their revenue

Nobody wants a browser that's focused on diversifying its revenue, especially from Mozilla which pretends to be a non-profit "free software community".

Chrome is paid for by ads and privacy violations, and now Firefox is paid for by "AI" companies? That is a sad state of affairs.

Ungoogled Chromium and Waterfox are at best a temporary measure. Perhaps the EU or one of the U.S. billionaires would be willing to fund a truly free (as in libre) browser engine that serves the public interest.

Mozilla the browser doesnt pretend to be a non profit. Mozilla corporation which runs the browser is a for profit company they do not solict donations and NEED to make money to survive. Its just that Mozilla corporation is owned by Mozilla foundation which is a non profit.

>Nobody wants a browser that's focused on diversifying its revenue I want a browser that has a sustainable business model so it wont collapse some time in the future. That means diversifying its revenue stream away from google's search contract.

Mozilla corp exists only to serve the foundation which owns the Firefox browser. That's the theory and associated legal fiction of course. Reality differs, but that is exactly what gp is complaining about.

It's amazing how hard it is for some people to understand that most users don't want to spend seconds (year right, it may be seconds it you already know what options you need and what they are) after every update to "customize" their software to work as well as it did before the update.

Every time i reinstall Firefox on a new machine, the number of annoyances that I need to remove or change increases.

Putting back the home button, removing the tabs overview button, disabling sponsored suggestions in the toolbar, putting the search bar back, removing the new AI toolbar, disabling the "It's been a while since you've used Firefox, do you want to cleanup your profile?", disabling the long-click tab preview, disabling telemetry, etc. etc.

It's ridiculous that all those things aren't just config in a plain text file.

that you are expected to edit in vim

I think you can with a user.js file, unless they changed that?

Nah, [BetterFox](https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox) still works fine

>This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI...

Because the phrase "AI first browser" is meaningless corpospeak - it can be anything or nothing and feels hollow. Reminiscent of all past failures of firefox.

I just want a good browser that respects my privacy and lets me run extensions that can hook at any point of handling page, not random experiments and random features that usually go against privacy or basically die within short time-frame.

> [Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

I don't want any of this built into my web browser. Period.

This is coming from someone who pays for a Claude Max subscription! I use AI all the time, but I don't want it unless I ask for it!!!

Reread your post with your evil PM hat on. You just said "I'm willing to pay for AI". That's all they hear.

Somehow they also think we'll pay for Gemini, GPT, Claude, perplexity and their browser thingy, co-pilot and whatever else they have going on. Not to mention, all these things do 95% the same and don't really have any moat.

I don't understand why these CEOs are so confident they're standing out from the rest. Because really, they don't.

Right now firefox is a browser as good as Chrome and in a few niche things better, but its having a deeply difficult time getting/keeping marketshare.

I don't see their big masterplan for when Firefox is just as good as the other AI powered browsers. What will make people choose Mozilla? It's not like they're the first to come up with this idea and they don't even have their own models so one way or another they're going to play second fiddle to a competitor.

I think there's a really really strong part of 2. ??? / 3. profit!!! In all this. And not just in Mozilla. But more so.

I mean OpenAI, they have first-mover. Their moat is piling up legislation to slow down the others. Microsoft, they have all their office users, they will cram their AI down their throats whether they want it or not. They're way behind on model development due to strategic miscalculations but they traded their place as a hyperscaler for a ticket into the big game with OpenAI. Google, they have fuck you money and will do the same as Microsoft with their search and mail users.

But Mozilla? "Oh we want to get more into advertising". Ehm yeah basically what will alienate your last few supporters, and getting onto a market where people with 1000x more money than you have the entire market divided between them. Being slightly more "ethical" will be laughed away by their market forces.

Mozilla has the luck that it doesn't have too many independent investors. Not many people screaming "what are we doing about AI because everyone else doing it". They should have a little more insight and less pressure but instead they jump into the same pool with much bigger sharks.

In some ways I think it's that Mozilla leadership still seems themselves as a big tech player that is temporarily a little embarrassed on the field. Not like the second-rank one it is that has already thoroughly deeply lost and must really find something unique to have a reason to exist. Because being a small player is not super bad, many small outfits do great. But it requires a strong niche you're really really good at, better than all the rest. That kinda vision I just don't see from Mozilla.

I'm willing to pay for housing in New York. I'm not willing to pay for housing in Antarctica. The reasons being (1) I already have an apartment in New York and do not need another one and (2) I don't want to live in Antarctica.

Reread your post with your evil PM hat on. You just said "I'm willing to pay for housing". That's all they hear.

Seriously, once you've crossed the threshold to pay for something, they think that they can somehow manipulate you (advertising) or convince you (features) to pay them for it too. And honestly, if they do it with features, I'm willing to be convinced.

Then the "evil PMs" need to learn some common sense. I made the analogy purposefully absurd to (try to) show why this line of reasoning is ludicrous.

I want the people who make Firefox to make decisions about Firefox based on what users have been asking for instead of based on what a CEO of a for-profit decides is still not going to make them any money, just like every other plan that got pitched in the last 10 years that failed to turn their losing streak around.

It's not a knee-jerk reaction to "AI", it's a perfectly reasonable reaction to Mozilla yet again saying they're going to do something that the user base doesn't work, won't regain them marketshare, and that's going to take tens of thousands of dev hours away from working on all the things that would make Firefox a better browser, rather than a marginally less nonprofitable product.

While I do sympathize with the thought behind it, general user is already equating llm chat box as 'better browsing'. In terms of simple positioning vis-a-vis non-technical audience, this is one integration that does make fiscal sense.. if mozilla was a real business.

Now, personally, I would like to have sane defaults, where I can toggle stuff on and off, but we all know which way the wind blows in this case.

Firefox is not for general users, which is the problem that Mozilla's for a literal decade now. There is no way to make it better than Chrome or Safari (because it has to be better for every day users to switch, not just "as good" or even "way more configurable but slightly worse". It has to be appreciably better).

So the only user base is the power user. And then yes: sane defaults, and a way to turn things on and off. And functionality that makes power users tell their power user friends to give FF a try again. Because if you can't even do that, Firefox firmly deserves (and right now, it does) it's "we don't even really rank" position in the browser market.

The way to make Firefox better is by not doing the things that are making the other browsers worse. Ads and privacy are an example of areas where Chrome is clearly getting worse.

LLM integration... is arguable. Maybe it'll make Chrome worse, maybe not. Clunky and obtrusive integration certainly will.

These comments are full of people explaining how Firefox can differentiate from chrome and safari: don't force AI on us.

The problem with integrating a chat bot is that what you are effectively doing is the same thing as adding a single bookmark, except now it's taking up extra space. There IS no advantage here, it's unnecessary bloat.

I find that hard to believe, every general/average user I have spoken to does not use AI for anything in their daily lives and have either not tried it at all or only played with it a bit a few years ago when it first came out.

This 100% -- the AI features already in Firefox, for the most part, rely on local models. (Right now there is translation and tab-grouping, IIRC.)

Local based AI features are great and I wish they were used more often, instead of just offloading everything to cloud services with questionable privacy.

If we look at the last AI features they implemented it doesn't like they are betting on local models anymore.

Which ones? Translation is local. Preview summarization is local. Image description generation is local. Tab grouping is local. Sidebar can also show a locally hosted page.

The last feature was the sidebar and Google lens integration. For the sidebar the "can" does the heavy lifting but you should also include that it's hidden and won't sync if you use a local page...

Local models are nice for keeping the initial prompt and inference off someone else's machine, but there is still the question of what the AI feature will do with data produced.

I don't expect a business to make or maintain a suite of local model features in a browser free to download without monetizing the feature somehow. If said monetization strategy might mean selling my data or having the local model bring in ads, for example, the value of a local model goes down significantly IMO.

> We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints

Personally I'd prefer if Firefox didn't ship with 20 gigs of model weights.

I don't feel like I want AI in my browser. I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Maybe translation?

FWIW, Firefox already has AI-based translation using local models.

I like translation, it's come in handy a few times, and it's neat to know it's done locally.

I use it a lot more now I know it's done locally.

yeah, translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

All this would allow for a further breakdown of language barriers, and maybe the communities of various languages around the world could interact with each other much more on the same platforms/posts

Super charged search on page would also be nice

Agents (like a research agent) could also be interesting

Mozilla implementing a search feature which renders Google and/or its advertising capabilities irrelevant is highly unlikely so long as Mozilla is a financial vassal of Google.

Search on page (ctrl-f), not search on internet

Ah, I'd missed that, thanks.

If I have to fill a form for anything that matters, I'm doing it by hand. I don't even use the existing historical auto-complete stuff. It can fill stuff incorrectly. LLMs regularly get factual stuff wrong in mysterious ways when I engage with them as chat bots. It might be less effort to verify correctness than type in all the fields, but IMO there's less risk of missing or forgetting to check one of the fields.

I've had on so many cases autocomplete forms puts something in a field it shouldn't and messes up a submission. I've had it happen on travel documents that caused headaches later at the airport - especially if it fills in a hidden field because some bad web dev implemented it poorly.

It gets it wrong because the current "AI" for filling out forms is extremely weak and brittle compared to the general language models we have now.

Language models seem pretty weak and brittle in my interactions with them too.

Do you have an example form field that a general language model could fill out better than a human + highly focussed deterministic algorithm?

Ecommerce checkout. Filling out my address, billing adress, and credit card information. Things like drop downs or different formatting can mess up the current basic ones, but it really shouldn't be that hard for AI to figure out how to fill out such information it knows about me into the form.

I think I've found those unreliable in the past, but much more reliable as time goes on. I can't really remember the last time an address or credit card info was mishandled by autofill. I get that addresses can be poorly defined, but for one you've entered yourself, that you just want to be re-entered, I don't see why we can't solve that problem without AI.

I don't even want translation in my browser.

The ux changes and features remind us of pocket and all the other low value features that come with disruptive ux changes as other commenters have noted.

Meanwhile, Mozilla canned the servo and mdn projects which really did provide value for their user base.

I just know I've already had to chase down AI in Firefox I definitely did not ask for or activate, and I don't recall consenting to.

We're still in bubble-period hyper-polarized discourse: "shoehorn AI into absolutely everything and ram it down your throat" vs "all AI is bad and evil and destroying the world."

The former is a cause, the latter an effect of it.

I don't want any AI in anything apart from the Copilot app, where the AI that I use is. I don't want it in my IDE. I don't want it in my browser. I don't want it in my messaging client. I don't want it in my email app. I want it in the app, where it is, where I can choose to use it, give it what it needs, and leave at at bloody that.

I also want to have complete control over what data I provide to LLMs (at least as long as inference happens in the cloud), but I’d love to have them everywhere, not just a chat UI (which I suspect will be seen as a relatively pretty bizarre way of doing non-chat tasks on a computer).

There is also the matter of how training data was licensed to create these models. Local or not, it’s still based on stolen content. And really what transformative use case is there to have AI in the browser - none of the ones currently available step outside gimmicks that quickly get old and don’t really add value.

It doesn't matter what they exactly want to do, what it matters is they're wasting resources on it instead of keeping the ... browsing part ... up to date.

>I think people want AI in the browser

I don't. And the whole idea of Firefox's marketing is that it won't force things on me. Ofc course om frustrated. My core browser should serve pages and manage said pages. Anything else should be an option.

I'm beyond tired of being told my preferences, especially by people with incentives to extract money out of me.

I don't think a locally hosted LLM would be powerful enough for the supposed "agentic browsing" scenarios - at least if the browser is still supposed to run on average desktop PCs.

Not yet, but we’ll hopefully get there within at most a few years.

Get there by what mechanism? In the near term a good model pretty much requires a GPU, and it needs a lot of VRAM on that GPU. And the current state of the art of quantization has already gotten us most of the RAM-savings it possibly could.

And it doesn't look like the average computer with steam installed is going to get above 8GB VRAM for a long time, let alone the average computer in general. Even focusing on new computers it doesn't look that promising.

By M series and amd strix halo. You don't actually need a gpu, if the manufacturer knows that the use case will be running transformer models a more specialized NPU coupled with higher memory bandwidth of on the package RAM.

This will not result in locally running SOTA sized models, but it could result in a percentage of people running 100B - 200B models, which are large enough to do some useful things.

Those also contain powerful GPUs. Maybe I oversimplified but I considered them.

More importantly, it costs a lot of money to get that high bus width before you even add the memory. There is no way things like M pro and strix halo take over the mainstream in the next few years.

This is probably their plan to monetize this. They will partner with a AI company to 'enhance' the browser with a paid cloud model and the local model has no monetary incentive not to suck.

> I think people want AI in the browser

Sorry but no. I dont want another humans work summarized by some tool that's incapable of reasoning. It could get the whole meaning of the text wrong. Same with real time translation. Languages are things even humans get wrong regularly and I dont want some biased tool to do it for me.

>We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into..

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech

it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:

- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching

- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies

- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla

with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software

the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life

my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position

firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement

the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future

I don't want to have to max out my gpu to browse reddit.

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