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This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview.
EDIT: See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 liking AI features to defecating on your food. It's not a technical objection, it's a principled one.
Do they have any good kind?
What's the ratio?
And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning.
It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
To save users from copy-pasting to a separate chatbot instance, or installing sketchy extensions? It's clunky, but it's helpful and exposes users to more alternatives. AFAIK it can be made to connect to local models now, too.
LLM side tab is a powerful mode of AI use that most people haven't experienced yet; for some reason this space seems underdeveloped publicly relative to some proprietary/internal solutions at some companies that I have knowledge of.
> I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
Is there a difference beyond branding? FWIW, branding does matter and I hope Firefox remains a "browser with (optional) AI" and not "AI browser".
> I don't know what Mozilla means by "AI browser",
> "regular browser with an optional chat bot sidebar". I don't wanna figure out what it means
Fwiw, I don't use the AI sidebar. I'd have forgotten it existed if HN didn't bring it up as if it's shoved in your face like some chatbot in an IDE. But I guess if it was the latter people wouldn't be angry
Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense.
Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances at a monopoly, since it makes switching between providers easier.
Why is it so hard for people to just...not use a feature they don't like. Sure, the popup was annoying, but I still like that it let me know this feature exists. I don't use it now, but it might be useful to me in the future or so I can recommend it to someone who needs something like that.
If the search bar didn't exist and Google paid to be the home page, fewer people would find out about alternative search engines and id switching was more effor that changing one setting, fewer people would do it.
I just opened the AI sidebar for the first time and it gave me a list of 5 options, along with a link to a help page that compares them and links to each one's privacy policy. This is 1000x better than the current way people use AI, which is to bookmark ChatGPT and never try anything else (well, unless Gemini is shoved down their throat).
My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.
ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
I wouldn't.
Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.
In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.
Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.
And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...
Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"?
If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?
> My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day.
I seriously don't understand why everyone is upset about that. Do what I do and just don't open it or interact with it. No one is making you use it. It's trivial about if bytes because it's literally just a wrapper. So it doesn't affect you, why let it live rent free in your head and make you angry? Just sounds like you're looking for things to complain.
Personally I dislike both, and VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code.
Ideally they wouldn't make the product bad, with a badness opt-out, in the first place, but everyone in Silicon Valley's got to feed the AI monkey. So I guess this is the best we can expect.
(Also I didn't realize how bad this push got until I visited California recently, and saw every other billboard - that's physical ad over a road - pushing some unqualified form of AI magic on me).
> For those who wish to maintain some AI functionalities, a selective blocking option is available, enabling users to retain useful features like on-device translations while avoiding cloud-based services.
Honestly, I think people just like complaining. I think they like complaining about Firefox even more. There's plenty to complain about, but aren't there bigger fish to fry right now? Seems like complaining about some minnows while we're being circled by a bunch of great whites
All:
(1) Generated comments aren't allowed on HN - this rule predates LLMs but obviously applies even more now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment
(2) If you see accounts that look like they're mostly posting genAI comments, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. That's how I found my way to these cases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747998, by dang, 1 month ago:
Please don't post generated or AI-filtered posts to HN. We want to hear you in your own voice, and it's fine if your English isn't perfect.
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P.S. The actual comment is (surprise!) completely wrong. Visit Settings -> AI Controls and you will see a granular set of feature switches under the master kill switch. Each has a clear title and description and is independent.
Read every comment made since the account started posting again.
Tell me what you think about those comments.
Thanks for making a stink about it.
(edit: I now see you used the p-word to describe it too, and normally I'd edit my post to use a different synonym, but "pablum" really is the perfect description. I also assume you already reported this account to hn@ so I won't bug the mods a second time.)
However, I think data control is critical and any kind of implicit cloud service such as transmission to remote AI servers should be toggle-able clearly, just like search autocomplete can be done.