I can see the use of LLMs and machine learning tools like TTS, translators and grammar checkers to be integrated to browser, but only depending on local models or better, like Firefox's case to CPU optimized local models.
A lot of anti-AI backlash seems to exempt machine translation, which as far as I can tell is just because it's been around for so long that people are comfortable with it and don't see it as new or AI-y, which imho spells doom for a lot of this- in ten years automatic tab groups will seem just as natural and non-intrusive as machine translation.
A local LLM that I explicitly bring up to ask a question and dismiss (ie no CPU or RAM usage) when I'm done consulting it is nice. A piece of software I'm using interrupting what I'm doing to ask me a useless and annoying question or to make an unsolicited change to my workspace leaves me thinking about permanently uninstalling it.
I will never want automatic tab groups or automatic anything else. I don't even want an "integrated" desktop environment - I use i3 to get away from that. I hate all the useless bullshit half baked features that are constantly shoved in my face.
If the modern web was compatible with it I'd use a text based browser for 90% of what I do online. And if that were the case I'd still welcome a built in machine translation feature because it's an incredibly useful tool.
It's still relatively new in FF and I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about it annoying them with popups, even though it absolutely does throw up an interrupting overlay, especially on mobile.
The flow is 1) you drag a tab over another tab and it suggests a name for the tab group and 2) you click on a tab group and another button offers to suggest more of your tabs you can add to the group. That's less intrusive than Firefox Translations are by default.
It's much more efficient on system resources than the larger LLMs downloaded by browsers for other tasks.
Do you also want to remove the ML that gets the results you want at the top of the address bar autocomplete. That's been around for 15 years and it's "AI" so might as well get rid of it right?
This "all ML sucks" because generative AI LLMs suck has to end. It's entirely a garbage take.
Mozilla decided to give businesses the ability to turn off generative AI features about 6 months ago.
There is Harper as local grammar checker; an amazing project, but it is only in English and not yet able to replace the mentioned tools: https://writewithharper.com/