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Comment by roldie | Hacker News Reader

Am I happy about it? No. But I don't understand the huge backlash in all the comments yesterday. It felt like everyone overreacted. For me, Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

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To me it's a bit like when your favorite fancy restaurant stops making its own bread in-house. The change itself isn't huge, and isn't all that surprising… but it's not a great sign for how the place will look in a decade.

It's more like your favorite fancy restaurant has a few dishes that suck. Instead of putting time into improving table service, fixing up the menu, maybe getting some aspects of service up to standards, they decided that every meal now comes with a back massage. That's not their core competency.

Firefox is good, but it could be great. Adding AI features aren't what will move the needle on their core competency.

I think it was just one of those throwaway lines. I raised an eyebrow when I read it. It seems like something written to appease some idiot on the board or something. If I thought there was a strong vision there it would be fine, but no one seems to have any vision for AI beyond some controlled tech demos that never quite work as advertised—at least not enough for you to use it in the way advertised.

Nah, if you read into the strategy doc, then compared to the relatively measured press release, it’s entirely gungho on AI

> Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

Same here, but lately it seems like Mozilla will stop at nothing to get me to stop using Firefox. At what point should I say enough is too much?

What exactly changed fundamentally in your experience? I have been using firefox for more than 10 years now, nothing changed that much to feel like complaining about.

People who have strong takes would probably comment more and quicker in such threads, and people without such strong takes not as much. It kind of makes sense, but often creates a weird, and possibly non-representative, impression. I am not overly happy over how mozilla handles stuff, but it all also feels like an overreaction to me.

That's modern social media for you. Turn everything into ragebait.

It's seen as cool to hate on AI right now. I haven't used Firefox in about 10 years, and this is definitely not a feature I would want, but if I were still using it I wouldn't get all exercised over it.

I think it's just trendy now to say "it's seen as cool to hate AI right now"

That fad is a few hours old.

Now we leave comments about people who think it's just trendy now to say "it's seen as cool to hate AI right now"

  > It felt like everyone overreacted

I think it is trendy to hate of Mozilla. I'm not sure why, but it is. I mean you get tons of people who will even say they haven't tried it since before the qantum days. Or people that tried it once and just gave up.

I seriously don't get it and I understand why there's conspiracies about disinformation campaigns. But on all places I don't understand how HN users are just happily giving the keys to the internet to a singular company, let along Google.

  > Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

Honestly, what doesn't it do? Everyone says chrome is better but other than a few niche things I have been entirely unconvinced.

Why are browsers even "sticky"? There's no social network. Bookmarks are trivial to migrate. It's like the easiest thing to switch out there...

I think it is trendy to hate on Firefox because of how cool Firefox felt in 2002 and how dominant they became in the mid 2000s before Chrome and so everything feels like a fall from grace from that.

I do think there have been missteps. I think Firefox is good and is my browser of choice but most of their new features feel superfluous.

Firefox has made some shady choices of late. The settings functionality is getting ever more unreliable and they are moving more essential settings to about:config and then you have to go and dig around in there and hope you find all interdependent parameters. That is one thing that has definitelybdeclined: be open to your users and enable them to customise the software. All the ML settings can only be changed via editing the profile. How many non-techies go and dig around in the profile?

>But I don't understand the huge backlash in all the comments yesterday.

Well, it was an excuse to get the pitchforks out! We love to do that around here. Especially if I can say "AI", "slop", "crypto", "MBA", etc.

I've come to the conclusion that anyone who uses the term "AI slop" probably doesn't have anything meaningful to say. Not that "AI slop" isn't a thing, but its use is just a buzzword that doesn't mean anything and is becoming less and less relevant as the tools improve.

This is exactly how some others treat anyone who says AI. It’s not as though somehow GANNs are suddenly deserving of being labeled ‘intelligent’ at precisely the time when corporations are betting the farm on their hopes and dreams of replacing biological intelligence. It’s just a marketing buzzword that sells a framing of worker deprecation, something businesses have been fantasizing about since the Industrial Revolution, right? And so anyone who’s using the term must have a dismissible opinion that need not be given serious consideration.

(This isn’t how I approach the topic, but one hopes that such unfounded dismissals are not widespread, eh?)

Schrodinger's GPT: it's taking our jobs, while simultaneously only capable of producing useless slop.

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