I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/

by rpgbr • 8 months ago

1275 748 8 months ago

WD-42• 8 months ago

Nobody ever wants anything in Firefox, but in this case it’s probably especially true.

cedilla• 8 months ago

People want a lot of stuff in Firefox. However, people also seem to neatly bin all features into either "obviously necessary part of a web browser" and "obviously extraneous nonsense" when what they really mean is "things I personally want" and "things I personally don't want".

everdrive4• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

coldpie3• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.

smlavine• 8 months ago

They're all using it.

Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.

gbear605• 8 months ago

If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.

lucasoshiro• 8 months ago

They're all using it, all the time, for everything

Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a "super-online bubble"

52-6F-622• 8 months ago

Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-technical people think it's another thing they have to learn and do not want to (except for those who have been conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is not a picture of mental health or stability for anyone). They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices.

They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.

Adrig• 8 months ago

My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.

giancarlostoro3• 8 months ago

I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything meaningful.

nunez2• 8 months ago

Loads of people are Google's AI Summaries; it's the first result, so, hard to miss.

mabedan2• 8 months ago

I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.

rwmj2• 8 months ago

How do you know its summaries are correct?

azinman2• 8 months ago

What are you constantly summarizing?

giancarlostoro3• 8 months ago

I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.

RansomStark4• 8 months ago

In firefox yeah! I use it often.

I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.

The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around

distances• 8 months ago

Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?

rpdillon2• 8 months ago

The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/

kbelder• 8 months ago

An AI specifically customized to pull the recipe out of long rambling cooking blog posts would be great. I'd use that regularly.

jmkni• 8 months ago

I agree

I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but can fuck off otherwise

Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice. The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said since years that we, the people, need back control over the world wide web. That includes the UI.

jve• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)

Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.

https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.

boplicity• 8 months ago

Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.

gspencley• 8 months ago

ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of the oldest examples.

These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.

Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.

allan_s• 8 months ago

3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.

hansmayer• 8 months ago

I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp! So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into nothing be damned!

nerdjon2• 8 months ago

Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI.

I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.

That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.

cratermoon2• 8 months ago

Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.

j4coh• 8 months ago

They need to show usage going up and to the right or the house of cards falls apart. So now you’re forced to use it.

JohnFen2• 8 months ago

This is why I use the term "genAI" rather than "AI" when talking about things like LLMs, sora, etc.

catlifeonmars• 8 months ago

I think companies should also advertise when they use JavaScript on the page. “Use this new feature —- why? Because it’s powered by JavaScript”

krick2• 8 months ago

what used to be just called ML

FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does.

So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.

thewebguyd4• 8 months ago

Right, it should be invisible to the user. Those formerly-called-ML features are useful. They do a very specific, limited function, and "Just Work."

What I definitively don't want, yet it's what is currently happening, is a chatbot crammed into every single app and then shoved down your throat.

andy992• 8 months ago

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.

Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.

vidarh14• 8 months ago

The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.

amarant• 8 months ago

Clippy really is back

thih93• 8 months ago

I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)

You can disable AI in Google products.

E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.

Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322

cornholio2• 8 months ago

no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda

All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.

The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.

marcosdumay• 8 months ago

I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen.

Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.

StableAlkyne• 8 months ago

That's where I'm at with these.

I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.

That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.

dawnerd2• 8 months ago

I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.

tjpnz2• 8 months ago

"X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.

tracker13• 8 months ago

Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly.

I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better.

I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.

data-ottawa• 8 months ago

Even when I do try them I find myself let down.

I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.

If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out.

Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.

jdeibele• 8 months ago

I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings.

https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's

a-dub• 8 months ago

this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal position and software uis keep turning into a constant game of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual menu or send button is.

ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.

PaulHoule5• 8 months ago

It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.

Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.

Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.

I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.

Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.

[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.

sodapopcan• 8 months ago

So don't use Google products. I'm not trying to be snarky but, other than at work I suppose, it's not that hard to avoid them.

soperj• 8 months ago

Clippy agrees.

neural_thing• 8 months ago

I was super mad about the help me write thing to, so I built https://owleditor.com - check it out!

ryandrake2• 8 months ago

The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!

JohnMakin• 8 months ago

The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.

wnevets• 8 months ago

It’s the constant nagging about them.

If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.

pwg• 8 months ago

I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.

Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

abustamam• 8 months ago

Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to dismiss.

sidewndr463• 8 months ago

Someone has a KPI to increase user engagement with AI features. The goal will be met, by any means.

Razengan• 8 months ago

by offers to “help me write” or whatever.

It's fucking Clippy all over again

dreamcompiler3• 8 months ago

Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle. For that matter, neither have most website makers who constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a high Z-index.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

jacquesm2• 8 months ago

This. It is insane the amount of pushing behind these products. I'm expecting my ballpoint pen to start prompting me to write nicer using AI any time now.

And the worst thing is not only is it being pushed, it is being pushed at the expense of UI/UX. No, Google, I don't need 'help to write' or 'to summarize this document'. I can read and write just fine. And the worst thing of all is that you can't turn it off because they'll just move it around every other week.

vidarh14• 8 months ago

Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now)

So, yes, I want AI in "everything".

And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.

reaperducer• 8 months ago

The person you're replying to noted that there will be "edge cases." Your response exemplifies this.

In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."

TimByte3• 8 months ago

There's a big difference between having access to AI tools and baking AI into everything by default

gchamonlive• 8 months ago

I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.

glenstein13• 8 months ago

I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0]

Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.

But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525

cwillu5• 8 months ago

I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.

danudey3• 8 months ago

Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you, the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey) that changes the page for you. This means you only make one request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the page from that point on.

cobbal• 8 months ago

Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels stupidly vulnerable to injection.

benterix• 8 months ago

If you want a short answer: most people don't.

But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).

slightwinder• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.

Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.

xinayder2• 8 months ago

Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this.

No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI. Why not provide an extension?

mkayokay• 8 months ago

Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that positive either:

Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>

nijave• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.

It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.

rpdillon2• 8 months ago

I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks.

That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.

chemotaxis• 8 months ago

before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about

Spoiler: you didn't.

Theodores• 8 months ago

AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you.

However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat.

Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.

Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them.

There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence.

Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards.

Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!

Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!

killerstorm• 8 months ago

If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.

vharuck• 8 months ago

I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."

andrewmutz• 8 months ago

The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another

I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".

xinayder2• 8 months ago

We both know this is never going to happen on mainstream browsers, they'll just keep shoving AI into your face until you become dependent to it.

flenserboy• 8 months ago

Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.

It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.

tjpnz2• 8 months ago

That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?

999900000999• 8 months ago

It's magic when it's optional.

I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.

But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.

From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears.

As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.

mtillman• 8 months ago

Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.

RyanOD• 8 months ago

For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.

RiverCrochet• 8 months ago

I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it.

If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.

Kye• 8 months ago

The new similar sound search in Ableton Live is handy. It's getting stem separation soon and I expect to get some use out of it.

vbezhenar• 8 months ago

I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past, recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value.

Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.

ilikehurdles• 8 months ago

AI is useful. I use Claude code every single day for building software.

I also wouldn’t want to go back to only web search for finding things out. Search engines are generally inferior.

pjmlp• 8 months ago

Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent, meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition, getting better IDE tooling, and such.

Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.

a_t482• 8 months ago

Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I’m rusty and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a query that mutates the db.

danudey3• 8 months ago

"How do I get a list of every resource in a project"

"How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count"

Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.

GuB-42• 8 months ago

I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI".

For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do.

The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.

beefnugs• 8 months ago

What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it?

Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it

quitit• 8 months ago

I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement.

Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:

1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!

1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.

1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?

2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.

2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.

2020s: AI, AI, AI!

etempleton• 8 months ago

Step 1. Integrate AI

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit

georgeecollins• 8 months ago

For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page.

The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.

Aurornis• 8 months ago

The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code I’m looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together.

There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.

Sharlin• 8 months ago

What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.

rsaz• 8 months ago

Have you considered Raycast? I don’t use it for those features myself, but it is extensible and has a large community, so even if it can’t do those things by default, I’m sure you could configure it to.

junon• 8 months ago

I can't even open Adobe Acrobat anymore. There's AI shit in almost every corner and toolbar of the app.

This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of this I can take.

ls-a• 8 months ago

They need to access your data somehow

paradox4604• 8 months ago

The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more

Most (all?) of it runs locally too

paulddraper• 8 months ago

Yes.

I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in replying.

I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are interesting to me.

I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products by complex conditions.

I want AI in my car to make me safer.

I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of interruptions.

I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have already asked me.

I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate.

I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.

phplovesong2• 8 months ago

Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI has not really improved anything.

AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.

nickff• 8 months ago

Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.

tim3333• 8 months ago

I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format.

I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.

muppetman• 8 months ago

No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.

darepublic2• 8 months ago

I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh

notatoad• 8 months ago

Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that.

in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.

subscribed• 8 months ago

I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in vscode.

It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts).

It definitely has its place.

crazygringo• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

I most definitely do.

I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it.

I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".

Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time.

Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!

vitaflo• 8 months ago

Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.

mvdtnz• 8 months ago

I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other newly introduced features.

mannanj• 8 months ago

The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.

wslh• 8 months ago

Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking" (e.g. prompting)

hidelooktropic• 8 months ago

Yes. I want AI in some things (some)

wahnfrieden• 8 months ago

I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools

geooff_• 8 months ago

I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a complete rework of everything "designed for agents".

raffael_de• 8 months ago

It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my machines to be predictable and stupid.

mattmaroon3• 8 months ago

It’s great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been easier.

There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.

bambax2• 8 months ago

Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a word?)

standardly• 8 months ago

Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode, glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go to chatgpt.com

ericmcer• 8 months ago

We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to.

I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer.

It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.

wartywhoa23• 8 months ago

How dare you deny your AI overlord an oportunity to train itself further on your data for free?!

Krasnol• 8 months ago

I would love it if it could clean up my mp3 collection.

I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.

kulahan• 8 months ago

Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.

mark_l_watson• 8 months ago

Good question.

I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.

AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.

The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.

JumpCrisscross2• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

AI ad blocking might be nice.

8note• 8 months ago

i probably do, but i want it to work as some magic behind the scenes, not as an embedded chat app that i have to type in.

a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance

dreamcompiler3• 8 months ago

Does anyone want AI in anything?

Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".

I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.

Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.

Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.

We are a very fucked-up industry.

rmwaite• 8 months ago

I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.

kure256• 8 months ago

More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites. The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility.

If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.

We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...

cncjchsue7• 8 months ago

I want it. They just need to figure out the ux. Chat ain't it. I'd love voice chat to access the web.

frxx• 8 months ago

That's what I've been saying for some time now... "No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't.

Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.

Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.

And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.

jjaksic• 8 months ago

Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.

cykros• 8 months ago

What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.

JohnFen2• 8 months ago

Mozilla's gonna Mozilla.

I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.

_verandaguy2• 8 months ago

It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.

noir_lord4• 8 months ago

    browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
    browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
    browser.ml.chat.page set to false
    browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
    browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
    browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
    browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
    browser.ml.enable set to false
    browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
    browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
    browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
    browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
    extensions.ml.enabled set to false

That should do it.

Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).

    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
    user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false);
    user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false);
    user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false);
    user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);

It's a garbage feature that no one appears to have asked for.

vt240• 8 months ago

I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.

BearOso4• 8 months ago

From their history, you can expect the exact opposite. Remember the Mr robot fiasco?

TimByte3• 8 months ago

Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more front-and-center over time

CrzyLngPwd• 8 months ago

I want AI in VSC as an assistant, but that's it.

If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time ago.

Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might pay for YT if they did that.

nyeah• 8 months ago

Yeah, I think there's a market for suppressing AI slop.

mnbpdx• 8 months ago

would be funny if openAI couldn't turn a profit but somebody could suppressing it

jordanb• 8 months ago

The fact that Mozilla thinks people want AI in Firefox is proof that Mozilla has the wrong leadership.

wkat4242• 8 months ago

Welllll.. Yes and no.

If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)

But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.

It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.

jmathai• 8 months ago

There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the masses.

What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.

I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.

Tweeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525

transcriptase• 8 months ago

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.

That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

brazukadev• 8 months ago

Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.

aquova• 8 months ago

I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.

The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.

probably_wrong• 8 months ago

Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.

Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.

I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

BearOso4• 8 months ago

The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.

People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.

pfortuny• 8 months ago

Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.

s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g

Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.

CamouflagedKiwi• 8 months ago

I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...

gr4vityWall• 8 months ago

they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source

They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.

abdullahkhalids• 8 months ago

There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.

It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.

I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.

Seattle3503• 8 months ago

Chrome has essentially won. ... Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch

You hit the nail on the head with this one

genter• 8 months ago

I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.

debugnik3• 8 months ago

kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money

Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.

perch56• 8 months ago

Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.

paradox4604• 8 months ago

A distinction without substance

phantasmish• 8 months ago

I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.

An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.

Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.

rollcat3• 8 months ago

Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.

Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.

Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.

benrutter• 8 months ago

Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.

swed420• 8 months ago

Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird

charcircuit2• 8 months ago

that mostly just take out tracking and AI features

Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.

rincebrain• 8 months ago

Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.

So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.

I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.

It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.

In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.

railka2• 8 months ago

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.

Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)

Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.

Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

tcoff91• 8 months ago

It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.

thsbrown• 8 months ago

I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.

The pessimism can get old.

DeusExMachina• 8 months ago

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.

Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.

CjHuber• 8 months ago

I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.

zgk7iqea4• 8 months ago

Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.

Kwantuum• 8 months ago

I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.

kakuri• 8 months ago

I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.

palmotea• 8 months ago

Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity.

Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.

AlienRobot2• 8 months ago

Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.

I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.

The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.

I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?

Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?

Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.

If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.

bloppe2• 8 months ago

Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.

Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?

t_mann• 8 months ago

Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.

chii• 8 months ago

any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity

because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.

It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare.

Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations.

It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.

dbg31415• 8 months ago

I want Mozilla Observatory.

They did a good job with that.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory

Xss3• 8 months ago

I dont care if Firefox is faster than chrome or edge.

I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.

xnx• 8 months ago

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.

Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.

Lapel2742• 8 months ago

I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.

The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).

Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.

renewiltord2• 8 months ago

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla

Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.

mrandish2• 8 months ago

I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-....

I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:

“the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”

Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.

bakugo2• 8 months ago

with fewer restrictions on extensions

I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.

You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.

oytis• 8 months ago

Wrong, Google wants it very much. Otherwise there would be a usable, well-maintained web browser without AI on the market and everyone would just use it

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like response. I tire of all these interfaces.

fuzzy2• 8 months ago

What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead, you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly LLM agents).

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

eventually, but that's going to take a decade at this rate... no one has a voice assistant that can actually do anything worthwhile beyond than flip some light switches

right now we could get a browser that understands what's on the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user experience

I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd rather AI handle it

meindnoch• 8 months ago

yuck.

hooverd2• 8 months ago

try asking a person?

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

society has clearly moved on beyond "pay a person to do it" so if I can talk to something that can understand language well enough to do tasks on my behalf that's what I have to take

basilgohar• 8 months ago

What is most upsetting is that they just offered access to the large commercial AI providers and no clear way to have a self-hosted or alternative option. THIS is where they lost their way. They must be profiting or partnering, no longer serving the community.

wordpad• 8 months ago

Heck yes, we want jt, can't imagine browsing without it.

It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of value.

smodo• 8 months ago

Well maybe you lose your ability to focus or your sanity or your privacy but yeah.

topaz02• 8 months ago

So you can get 10x the brain damage in the same amount of time. This is not a great case.

hooverd2• 8 months ago

"I want to liquefy my brain on short form video" is quite a take.

riskable2• 8 months ago

If I could get Firefox to perform searches on my behalf via the AI sidebar that would be amazing! Are you kidding me? YES I WANT THIS!

Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension—where I can pick which AI I'm using—then I'm all for it. I'll just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.

NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper grammar-checking AI too. That would be super useful. I'd love that!

Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.

impossiblefork• 8 months ago

I think it could be nice in the longer term, as AI gets better. Especially if it's local.

No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual websites, then we would actually be able to use the public internet.

It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though, but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a browser engine.

jillesvangurp• 8 months ago

Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas, and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome and their search engine.

I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.

I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.

Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.

Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.

Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".

joelthelion• 8 months ago

I wouldn't mind being able to quickly ask an llm about the page I'm browsing or some text I select.

flatline2• 8 months ago

Serious question: to what end? I'm pretty adept at skimming text and honing in on things of interest. I have also spent years in academic and professional environments developing those skills, so I genuinely may not understand some common use cases.

flkiwi• 8 months ago

In a typical corporate environment, you cannot assume the recipient of an email will read past the first sentence, maybe not even the subject line. A vast number of people simply do not read. They can but they don’t.

godshatter• 8 months ago

I can see this if you're looking over something and don't know what it is. Highlight it and right-click or whatever and ask the AI to give you a quick summary. Similar to how wikipedia links will show enough in the preview to get an idea what it might be.

torben-friis2• 8 months ago

I’m currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I’m using Firefox as a daily driver for the first time in a decade.

While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…

It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.

rwmj2• 8 months ago

They could have saved all the Google money and built a huge non-profit foundation dedicated to making the best browser. Instead they spent it on C-suite salaries and idiotic side quests. This is the consequence.

noir_lord4• 8 months ago

They have Telemetry as well which is on by default - see under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" in the settings.

dralley• 8 months ago

I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.

HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).

The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.

tmtvl• 8 months ago

Well, as long as:

- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,

- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,

- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),

- and the weights and training code are open,

I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.

railka2• 8 months ago

These tabs will probably be similar to the tabs in browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity. And some people really do use these browsers. Perhaps this is Mozilla's chance to monetize. Give at least some users the opportunity to use this feature and pay Mozilla.

chironjit• 8 months ago

I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I have questions.

My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.

I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)

berkes6• 8 months ago

Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.

I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it utterly useless.

Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case Mistral).

The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu) hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for gpt, copilot, mistral or even claude and the sidebar just gives an error) but even if they did: what problem do these extra buttons and integrations solve? Am I missing something?

Do note that I would love integration the other way around: to have an AI agent (through an MCP for example) drive my firefox. Safely, contained, etc etc. I am not an AI luddite. I just find the firefox sidebar offering no value at all.

chrisweekly• 8 months ago

I think that's exactly what people are doing w the Playwright MCP...

prophesi2• 8 months ago

I was also frustrated by the short context length for summarizing and found you can increase it in about:config via:

browser.ml.chat.maxLength

trenchpilgrim2• 8 months ago

Being able to e.g. hook up Claude Code to any webpage would be killer for both web development and task automation.

like_any_other• 8 months ago

I thought the AI pane was convenient. Then I wanted to try a different AI service, and couldn't do so without losing all the content in the currently open pane. And I realized - this would be so much better if it was just a regular tab. Like we already have.

llarsson• 8 months ago

There are already APIs being developed that assume a browser has an LLM either inside it or otherwise available, see for instance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Summarizer_...

So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.

berkes6• 8 months ago

I don't want AI in Firefox.

For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".

In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.

So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.

Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.

jy14898• 8 months ago

I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web browser, you don't use it compositionally.

cwillu5• 8 months ago

But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_ use arbitrary things compositionally.

nonethewiser• 8 months ago

In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).

anuramat4• 8 months ago

by this logic sockets are also non-unix

ninalanyon4• 8 months ago

you don't use it compositionally.

I would if I could!

berkes6• 8 months ago

Not literally. But in spirit.

I don't want my web browser to be a mediocre PDF reader. I want my good and perfected PDF reader to be a PDF reader. I don't want my web browser to be a Web development IDE. I want a specialised (version of) a browser with all the developer tools and one that lacks all these features is lighter, safer and simpler for browsing. I don't want an FTP client in my web browser (I don't want one anywere lol). Firefox was extracted from Mozilla back in the days exactly because Mozilla had become a browser that was bloated and crammed full of features that were unpolished or just subpar. Firefox saved Mozilla and fought back by being lean, fast, and terribly focused at doing one thing and doing talhat well.

I want a browser that's good and forever improving in letting me browse the web and run and use web-apps.

vidarh14• 8 months ago

We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.

But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.

ninalanyon4• 8 months ago

I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.

MangoToupe2• 8 months ago

For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".

I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything platform—perhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.

JohnPDickerson• 8 months ago

I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.

Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.

A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.

You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack

sorcercode• 8 months ago

I couldn't disagree more. I want responsible AI and i would expect Mozilla to lead the way on how to do this when it comes to browsers (they were pioneers when it came to containers and privacy control).

Here's some ways I can think of:

- seamless integration with local models

- opt in and opt out experience when needed

- ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)

- ai and accessibility

these are off the top of my head.

it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.

I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and short sighted.

agentultra• 8 months ago

Clearly it's not, "nobody."

But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent releases.

You can't be all things to all people.

Etherlord87• 8 months ago

I think fewer and fewer people want Mozilla in their Firefox ;) Maybe we'll get a better non-profit organization make a Firefox fork at some point.

rs1862• 8 months ago

There is zero money in making a browser.

liminal• 8 months ago

Publishers are using AI to generate pages. I want AI to extract the worthwhile bits. Why shouldn't users have tools too?

gmuslera• 8 months ago

"nobody"... of the vocal ones.

Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could affect much more than just privacy.

moontear2• 8 months ago

Go to about:config and set browser.ml.enabled to false and throw in browser.ml.chat.enabled (false) for good measure. Done.

saint_yossarian2• 8 months ago

You'd think so, but you also need to set browser.ml.chat.menu to false to remove a context menu item.

moontear2• 8 months ago

Looking at https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/components... it is a bit weird, that there isn't a general check for browser.ml.enabled true/false.

Krssst2• 8 months ago

I think the option to disable the context menu item is right in said context menu. Best place to put the option honestly, I wish all AI features had a disable button right next to them.

altcognito2• 8 months ago

People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.

I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.

Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.

riskable2• 8 months ago

People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.

Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.

altcognito2• 8 months ago

Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in expanding the scope without saying as much.

Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...

The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)

So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

TimByte3• 8 months ago

I get that Mozilla's trying to stay relevant in a changing landscape, but maybe listening to their core users is the competitive edge

nba456_• 8 months ago

i do

punkbit• 8 months ago

Maybe there are people higher up with a lot of money who force these features. At the end of the day, the builders have the obey.

rs1862• 8 months ago

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.

Why would they want AI?

homebrewer• 8 months ago

Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel). It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+ until relatively recently.

It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.

mrits2• 8 months ago

After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it

noir_lord4• 8 months ago

They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the v3 manifest limitations.

Synaesthesia• 8 months ago

On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform.

It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature.

For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.

Lord-Jobo2• 8 months ago

Everything but web games which almost always perform better on chrome. Probably not Firefox’s fault 95% of the time though

nativeit7• 8 months ago

I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.

clueless2• 8 months ago

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on....

Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

nativeit7• 8 months ago

I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.

NoGravitas2• 8 months ago

I have used WebUSB exactly once: to use the GrapheneOS webinstaller. I keep a copy of Chromium around and use it about once a year for some kind of nonsense along these lines.

tucnak2• 8 months ago

WebUSB is amazing for trusted computation on TKey platform, i.e. you don't have to trust the browser to load the correct program as the key is always DICE-derived deterministically. The browser is the best thing since sliced bread for running all kinds of programs without having to actually install any of them.

WebUSB is great to that end!

adolph• 8 months ago

I think using AI to adjust the salience landscape of a web page (aka ad blocking) would be welcomed.

kgwxd• 8 months ago

If they did things right, it shouldn't matter. Default Firefox should be nothing but a browser, everything else should be an extension. And Mozilla should be beholden to the same restrictions every other extension developer is.

quotemstr• 8 months ago

Only reason Firefox has 2% market share is that Mozilla's leaders keep listening to a tiny, loud minority of extremely online luddites instead of delivering actual users what they want. The anti-AI set on HN is the same set that claims users want feature phones, not smartphones. They'd probably also be against long-distance telephone lines and the wheel.

strictnein• 8 months ago

I mean, who were they listening to when they acquired Pocket and integrated it into Firefox? Or decided to build their own video chat service? Or an encrypted file sharing service? Or Persona, Firefox OS, Firefox Hello, etc etc. These weren't just bad decisions in retrospect, these were clearly bad decisions at the time.

https://killedbymozilla.com/

daemonologist• 8 months ago

The built-in translate is nice. The LLM stuff I don't use, but as long as it's tucked away in its own sidebar I don't mind.

dmantis• 8 months ago

As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any issues with that.

E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?

I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.

If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.

vidarh14• 8 months ago

Yeah, I just gave an example elsewhere of turning a Notion page into a JSON object, that Claude Code trivially did with Playwright, but that'd be far nicer if I could just click a button to talk about the current page. I'd be happy for it to be sandboxed, as long as it's easily accessible.

Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a lot of people's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it, and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would be a gamechanger.

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

I also wondered about this. Mozilla pushed out some AI buttons.

I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.

I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.

The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.

notepad0x905• 8 months ago

I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.

isodev4• 8 months ago

"AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm

Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.

jajuuka3• 8 months ago

Another example of "nobody I know" and not nobody.

orbital-decay3• 8 months ago

That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

notepad0x905• 8 months ago

I myself can see using that some day. I was dismissive of AI-assisted search results, now I'm back to using google search most of the time over duckduckgo, because of quality. I don't want to be forced to abandon firefox down the road. Every feature they add,from pocket,vpns, to this, is optional. Just don't use it. Let firefox get more marketshare. It's the only Google alternative.

roncesvalles• 8 months ago

You didn't even read 6 sentences into TFA. 52/52 of the closed-beta testers of this feature want it removed.

clueless2• 8 months ago

how is 52 users representative??

notepad0x905• 8 months ago

that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.

enraged_camel• 8 months ago

Who exactly are those closed-beta testers, and what makes you think they are representative of the average user?

Before accusing people of not having read TFA maybe you should do some critical thinking yourself.

Rebelgecko2• 8 months ago

I thought the 52 were just forum randos?

dwedge3• 8 months ago

I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and in the next paragraph mention 52 responses to the announcement at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from anyone. Very different thing.

moffkalast2• 8 months ago

Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking, have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly.

Currently they've at least got one of the three.

stingraycharles• 8 months ago

doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”?

what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.

notepad0x905• 8 months ago

They also need to integrate with windows/enterprise setups better, that's one of the main reasons people use chrome based browsers.

hbn2• 8 months ago

They really need to work on making an easier transition from Chrome if they care about converting users. Add an out of the box (preferably default) option to make the tabs look normal and not ugly like they are now. Change the private window shortcut to Cmd(Ctrl)+Shift+N like every browser has standardized on. Also I swear they override the normal text input behaviour, specifically if I'm using option+left/right arrows to jump between tokens in the URL bar, it jumps my cursor to unexpected places, like at the wrong side of periods.

Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off everything Chrome does in that department.

array_key_first2• 8 months ago

Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.

And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.

fullshark• 8 months ago

They want to browse the internet, and really that means browse the three sites they care about. They aren't going to change their browser cause of AI capabilities, so ultimately it doesn't matter. It's like arguing over whether users want dark mode. Some do, it's not going to change market share meaningfully.

nashashmi• 8 months ago

Allow me to be a devil's advocate here. I don't natively like AI in Firefox. But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.

Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.

Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.

Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.

The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.

Edit: rearranged paragraphs.

cwillu5• 8 months ago

“But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.”

Dear god, no. The last thing I want to be doing is telling grandma over the phone how to sweet-talk the settings screen into turning her adblocker back on.

ufocia2• 8 months ago

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure I want AI in my browser, whatever that may mean, but I don't think everyone shares my view. To think otherwise is IMHO delusional.

mrits2• 8 months ago

Excited to see the all the security issues with the AI features leaking data in regular browser mode

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 8 months ago

People say Mozilla should try to make Firefox better to steal back usage from Chrome and then they say stuff like "nobody want AI in Firefox". Like it or not, AI it's here and if you want your browser to reach more users some AI will be required.

erikerikson• 8 months ago

Meanwhile a badly behaving page doesn't just maim the tab content area but freezes the whole browser. I've been using Firefox because my Chrome install got borked so I've used that to try giving FF a real try. I feel like I regularly have to get it out of my way. Maybe fix the browser first.

flatline2• 8 months ago

A more cynical take/question: is Mozilla just pursuing these initiatives because their corporate sponsors need to push AI everywhere they can to justify their burn, in the hopes that a profitable use case eventually arises with a sufficient user base accustomed to the technology to pay for it?

captainkrtek• 8 months ago

AI as a word now even puts me off. Every podcast ad read, every news story, every linkedin post. It’s exhausting

I can’t roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like “How can agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?”

throwA29B• 8 months ago

Can't wait for the Ladybird to arrive.

dana321• 8 months ago

ChatGPT Atlas, anyone?

chankstein382• 8 months ago

We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and more profitable for us because we can sell your data!

Fixed that for you greed dbags.

kburman2• 8 months ago

Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about.

This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.

Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.

forgotpwd16• 8 months ago

refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser

Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.

nativeit7• 8 months ago

I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.

glenstein13• 8 months ago

This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time:

(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.

(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).

(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.

(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.

(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.

(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.

That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.

So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.

exographicskip3• 8 months ago

Thanks for this. Used Firefox since 1.0. Donate to their non-profit arm every month.

Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions.

Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.

creatonez2• 8 months ago

The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.

I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:

Firefox OS: 2013

Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014

Directory Tiles: 2014

Pocket acquisition: 2015

Firefox Focus: 2015

Cliqz experiment: 2017

"Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017

kburman2• 8 months ago

You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.

(1) They spend more on browser development now...

Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.

(2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...

This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.

(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...

This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).

(4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...

The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.

(5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...

You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?

(6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...

This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.

You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").

Lord-Jobo2• 8 months ago

I don’t understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team is anemic.

Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.

nunez2• 8 months ago

I meant what were they expecting? A bunch of their privacy-wonk userbase to go "Oh shit; I'm finally gonna go all-in on the slop now that Mozilla's doing AI?"

Like, what were they thinking?

I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.

amoss• 8 months ago

I would prefer that contenteditable divs with multi-line contents would handle newlines in a consistent manner instead of the chaotic mess we have now. But I guess that doesn't pump stock valuations so AI slop it is.

1gn15• 8 months ago

I hate it when authors claim to speak for everyone.

napolux• 8 months ago

I like the AI support in Firefox. It's there, useful and when I don't want to use it, I don't use it.

As a ChatGPT subscriber I use it more since when I can just open a dedicated sidebar in Firefox with ChatGPT inside.

InMice• 8 months ago

Features that theyd be more dignified to offer as plugins if they had it.

NoSalt• 8 months ago

I don't want AI anywhere, but it seems I cannot open any of my familiar applications without having to stumble over their new, stupid "AI" button. It has become quite infuriating.

melagonster• 8 months ago

Actually, AI in edge is not bad.

dawnerd2• 8 months ago

I wish these features were added as extensions that you could uninstall vs being baked in.

constantcrying• 8 months ago

Mozilla spending their limited resources on something so absurd and irrelevant seems extremely strange.

People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.

Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.

To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.

65• 8 months ago

Boy am I excited for the Ladybird alpha release. We won't have to deal with Chromium browsers, Safari, or Firefox anymore.

markbao2• 8 months ago

Most of the loudest critics - and, I’ve found, many commenters on HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology users. To think that nobody wants these features isn’t based on what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more “I don’t like AI and everyone else should agree” rather than “the data shows that nobody likes AI”.

Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).

cyral• 8 months ago

Had to scroll way too far to find a comment like this. Unfortunately HN famously doesn’t understand what the average consumer wants. The Dropbox comment comes to mind.

rkomorn7• 8 months ago

I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in tech.

I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here.

Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and then turning out to be wrong?

Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by Dropbox, the band.

karel-3d• 8 months ago

Based on how many of these are there now, it's obvious some people want these features. I don't know the numbers, but some people obviously do want to chat with their browser now.

AnonHP• 8 months ago

Unfortunately there’s no winning for Mozilla.

Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the current state of “AI” and where it’s headed, the undeniable fact is that “AI” has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has had more than a few over the years).

What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It’s not easy. I’d rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail instead of just being left behind due to inaction.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 months ago

I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally client side but at the very least I need to understand what is sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent when I actively trigger the feature).

In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.

But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.

I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.

Simulacra• 8 months ago

I want as little AI in my life as possible, and I certainly want zero of it forced on me.

elAhmo• 8 months ago

It is just a question of how long can Mozilla hold its ground with useless initiatives like this which are not what their core user base wants.

Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on those core products.

exploderate• 8 months ago

What, of course we do?

Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating research sessions, by searching and organizing...

anuramat4• 8 months ago

counterpoint: I want AI in firefox

there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?

jajuuka3• 8 months ago

AI is unfortunately an umbrella term which people can project what they want on to. For reasonable people like yourself it's a tool to accomplish tasks. While for someone else it might be CoPilot showing up frequently and they don't disable or turn off the notifications and just get continually frustrated.

anuramat4• 8 months ago

so why not give mozilla the benefit of the doubt? why assume that it's necessarily gonna be a slopfest? I'm not exactly optimistic, but it could be good, I do want those features, and I'm not gonna switch to something like chrome

PanoptesYC• 8 months ago

Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default.

I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?

anuramat4• 8 months ago

good idea for them to make the features opt in

true, but that's not the same as "nobody wants AI"; them fucking it up once shouldn't mean that they should drop the entire idea; by this logic they should stop making browsers altogether

the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu

local translation is already available

and it's already "AI"

I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping ...

they already have a "suggest more tabs" thing that does exactly this using a local model; it's insanely slow, low quality, doesn't use gpu, but the idea is nice. I'm hoping they will continue working on it, as managing tabs across multiple windows is not exactly what I want to spend my time on, and it's exactly the type of a problem LLMs are perfect for

never had issues with ads

it could always be better; there's always a certain amount of sites that either don't work at all or still show ads, and I imagine you could use a local VLM to hide elements based on the actual rendered result; same with cookie banners, annoying sign-in prompts, and so on -- how is this not the coolest thing ever? as long as you have like 8gb (v/u)ram, you could immediately unshittify most of the web

zgk7iqea4• 8 months ago

Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves" in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/DPn_Re5AAkN/

metabagel2• 8 months ago

every site is broken

If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers. In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.

Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing to use their browser if you can avoid it.

zgk7iqea4• 8 months ago

Mozilla is an advertising company too. In terms of breakage, Im talking about more fundamental things like missing APIs and wrong rendering.

jajuuka3• 8 months ago

I want AI in Firefox. Blog disproven.

natnatenathan• 8 months ago

The reason I don't want AI integrated into my browser (or really anything else) is that the mental model for big tech moved from "providing value" to "capturing value" about 15 years ago, and I expect they will try to use this integration in an attempt to build a layer between the customer and all downstream services (stores, banks, information) so they can extract some form of tax on every transaction (ads, micro-fees), all while consolidating data about me to create new sources of revenue. I am one of those 'bright minds' who has wasted their talent improving marketing conversion by 0.001% instead of working to cure cancer. (Let's be honest, improvements are way better than 0.001%, I am good at my job).

knowitnone3• 8 months ago

All Mozilla cares about is how to slurp your data. They are just a unit of Google with a different name.

whitehexagon• 8 months ago

Even if LLMs seem to have reached their limits, and are no longer on the feature path towards AGI, I have a fundamental (possibly irrational) dislike for anything labeled AI, just in case this does become a stepping stone towards AGI.

On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation.

In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced advertising or digital currency for that matter.

tucnak2• 8 months ago

The plural form of "sheep" is simply "sheep."

fruitworks• 8 months ago

I do. I find the translation features useful

topaz02• 8 months ago

Lots of commenters replying with 'actually some people want this', or 'actually I want this'.

Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that when mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI integration in the browser. That at least indicates that the people who are actively following firefox development are substantially against this kind of feature. It's not just "I and the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important subset of firefox power users don't want it.

In other words, the people that are actively going out of their way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based on having access to such things... to which I say... really??? But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who will choose firefox over whatever corporate-captured competitor is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.

Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some other commenters, is that, whether or not people do want this, they shouldn't want it. It is bad for users and for the world to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.

beezle• 8 months ago

I go back to pre-Firefox Mozilla browsers. What I want is faster, less bloat and far better memory management - a corrorlary is probably 'fix all outstanding bugs'. Were it me, I'd put a moratorium of three years on adding anything new, AI in particular.

As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M

Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.

nathias• 8 months ago

why not? chatGPT frontend/ux is terrible, there should be thousands of alternatives

_23sd• 8 months ago

What strikes me as odd is the decision to position itself as just another AI‑enabled web browser, picking a fight with big techs and better‑funded startups whose users are less hostile (and sometimes enthusiastic) about adding AI to web browsing.

By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.

antonyh• 8 months ago

How much is BigAI paying Moz to integrate these things? I has to be about the dollar surely?

vmesel• 8 months ago

Muito bom ver um texto de um Brasileiro em numero 1 aqui! Parabéns Rodrigo!

4ggr0• 8 months ago

i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely different UI after all this time.

submeta• 8 months ago

I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.

Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.

Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.

And now Firefox.

Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.

Workaccount2• 8 months ago

Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself.

Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.

They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.

Signed, a 20 year user.

rpgbr2• 8 months ago

I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.

wilsonnb3• 8 months ago

In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS.

97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)

paradox4604• 8 months ago

Firefox has always felt rather bad on Mac. Ages ago they made Camino, which was basically "aqua Firefox" and it was nice.

ethmarks2• 8 months ago

Is it really that big of a task? More so than maintaining custom spellcheck dictionaries in every supported language? Even if they only implemented OS spellcheck compatibility on MacOS and Windows and just used the existing custom spellcheck on other OSes, that'd still be a huge improvement and they'd only have to do the work for two OSes rather than every OS that Firefox supports.

noisy_boy• 8 months ago

They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and text reader modes.

There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.

AlienRobot2• 8 months ago

They can steal Workspaces from Vivaldi.

Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.

Or they can steal the built-in RSS client form Vivaldi.

Or they can steal the ability to save sessions from Vivaldi.

Or they can steal the built-in notes from Vivaldi.

Or they can steal the tab stacking from Vivaldi.

Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.

Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?

tstrimple• 8 months ago

They can start with fixing the spell check

Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.

array_key_first2• 8 months ago

Firefox IS a high performance browser that is nice to use. It has much more tab management features than chrome and the speed is indistinguishable!

I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.

theoldgreybeard• 8 months ago

Mozilla will never be able to compete with Google, Microsoft or OpenAI - heck even Perplexity - for AI features in a browser. They shouldn't even try.

I've been test driving Waterfox and at this point I don't think I'll be going back.

egorfine2• 8 months ago

I think they're damned if they do ("who the fuck wants AI in everything") and damned if they don't ("Mozilla is so irrelevant they didn't even tried the AI race")

esskay• 8 months ago

It's a browser. A browser does not need AI baked in. Extensions/addons? Sure, go for it, the more the merrier. But forcing it on people was always going to be a daft move, especially for Mozilla who have completely lost their whole "We're not as bad as Google" schtick over the last few years.

MangoToupe2• 8 months ago

I wouldn't mind an AI ad-blocker. I just don't want it to futz with the actual content.

ineptech• 8 months ago

The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.

everfree6• 8 months ago

Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.

So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.

vaadu• 8 months ago

I want a browser to prioritize speed, standards, stability and security.

All other features should come via add-ons.

Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.

everfree6• 8 months ago

What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.

squarefoot• 8 months ago

For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be available when I need it as external loadable module (extension? plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as LibreWolf and others will remove that.

roughly• 8 months ago

Mozilla, after all, likely has a clearer view of the whole user base.

This assertion is relying on facts not in evidence.

insane_dreamer• 8 months ago

Google has an "AI Overview" whenever you search for something, and this is probably what Mozilla wants to enable. I think your average person will find it useful.

Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.

zhdc1• 8 months ago

Contrarian here. I've fell in love with Firefox's AI Chatbox sidebar. It's extremely helpful to have Gemini immediately available to help with translating and summarizing text.

SamDc73• 8 months ago

I've been a Firefox user for 5 years or so and I can tell you: yes no one needs AI in Firefox especially that Firefox users tend to be on the privacy conscious side of things

But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share, and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?

DrSiemer• 8 months ago

If it's really hidden in its own special tab and NEVER comes out unwanted, I can see some benefits.

It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue. Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my data the product.

codyb• 8 months ago

I use Firefox Developer Edition as my daily driver and it's a nice experience. I think there's an AI option in the settings I have turned off? Wolud

I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a bit more over time.

My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.

Bender• 8 months ago

I can only speak for myself. I do not want yet more bloat added to applications. With that bloat comes more vulnerabilities, maybe intentional or otherwise. "Ooopsie did we leak your ______ to the world? Gosh, we're so sorry." Enough already, just be a web browser. Keep it simple with the only dependency being the site I am visiting.

busymom0• 8 months ago

The only place I can think of where I might actually find AI useful but AI is simply not there yet is for the browser to analyze the page super quickly and remove junk - ads, analytics, cookie prompts, too much extra spacing, "AI mode" buttons, the microphone button on YouTube search, YouTube Shorts and community posts etc. Basically, I should be able to tell AI to remove something and it should be able to do it instantly.

The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.

webdoodle• 8 months ago

I don't want AI to have any of my data. Past, present or future.

everfree6• 8 months ago

I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in a minority.

* I summarize articles.

* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.

* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.

* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.

* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.

Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.

Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.

The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.

As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.

And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.

Krssst2• 8 months ago

The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu.

It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.

nativeit7• 8 months ago

How about it leaving it disabled and letting me enable it immediately if/when I choose.

mistrial9• 8 months ago

you can make this choice but it must be your choice. AI-in-Browser must be one of the biggest spy-profilers in the history of tech.

Zero AI in Firefox - I will compile from source rather than tolerate AI in the browser.

abhi555shek• 8 months ago

We're quickly moving from AI being a work helper to being the worst distraction of all times! Why Mozilla, why?

ajkjk4• 8 months ago

I think the underlying motivation here is that employees at Mozilla want to deliver big projects to get promoted / recognized / advance their careers. The fundamental "cause" for the misanthropic behavior is a perverse incentive structure. In my head I associate it with the "OKR" framework: when you're evaluated on "delivering recognizable projects" (regardless of value; it benefits everybody to pretend they have value) instead of "doing your job well" (whatever it is, whether glamorous or not) then you end up with bizarre corporate behaviors like this.

It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if they can invent recognizable deliverables, because the whole chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting / hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from everyone else also pretending.

But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even likes it.

None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so much free money going around. If you have to do an actually good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment, you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress the board/executives/big donors.

The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.

(Probably there are a few other things driving this framework also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as clueless about what makes software good for the users as everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have to to keep their jobs.)

This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS. But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh. And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it and for some reason that works because for mysterious and probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that either.

Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so disappointing.

maerF0x0• 8 months ago

Doesn't torbrowser use firefox? I wonder how a journalist could trust it if there's some obscure llm/ai involved?

everfree6• 8 months ago

Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any of Firefox's AI code or functionality.

phplovesong2• 8 months ago

Fuck, AI slop is literally everywhere. You need to go really deep to avoid it these days.

ratelimitsteve• 8 months ago

if my car comes with the ability to start normally but also an alternate mode where, by deisgn, it explodes and kills my entire family is that providing me with freedom of choice in my automobile experience? am I in control because I have the option to do things I would never under any circumstances actually want to do? or is someone trying to convince me that i'm in charge because I get to pick from a menu they wrote?

cptskippy• 8 months ago

They’re calling it “Window AI.”

Was this intentional or just a complete lack of attention to detail? Even their own screenshot contradicts this.

Does it matter? Yes. "Window AI" suggests there is an AI manager, where as "AI Window" suggests an isolated environment.

jlarocco• 8 months ago

It kills me that they leave out features desired by more or less everybody (like ad-block), while they add completely superfluous features like AI and Pocket to the core of Firefox.

It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.

dwheeler• 8 months ago

I love having built-in local natural language translation implemented by AI, which Firefox provides. Local models have different properties than remote properties, and natural language translation is a useful thing. AI should be added when it solves a real need, and the risks can be minimized (or at least controlled). The goal shouldn't be to use AI, the goal should be to solve problems for humans.

nativeit7• 8 months ago

Lol.

Could Not Give Kudos
Kudos could not be given to the message for the following reason: Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed messages per minute.

Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.

visarga• 8 months ago

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox

I think the author does not speak for me

im3w1l• 8 months ago

I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs at all).

I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.

mikkupikku3• 8 months ago

Speak for yourself, I do want to see Mozilla experimenting with new features and functionality opened up by new technology. Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be trying new things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It's new technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla should be on the forefront of figuring it out.

creatonez2• 8 months ago

Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing.

Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?

burnte3• 8 months ago

The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me?

AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.

I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).

janpio• 8 months ago

Probably that it's a decent first step, with a well defined feature set and user expectations, so a nice thing to try before they figure out what to do next. And the article this comment thread is about is a reaction to one of their announcements in that regard: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/

mavamaarten• 8 months ago

An AI that automatically clicks through cookie walls, declining everything: yes please!

Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.

SavioMak• 8 months ago

I use the AI side bar quite often, not having to manage windows/tabs to have the chat and the main content I am reading at the same time is nice.

asdfman123• 8 months ago

AI overuse drives me crazy but the steelman is that new technologies often involve a cringe experimentation phase before they find their "killer apps."

E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories changed the world.

TZubiri2• 8 months ago

But LLMs became possible precisely due to centralized server, their economies of scale, and their capacity to train on user data. All of which are against the core tenets of locality, privacy and low cost (gratis) of FOSS.

Sorry guys, but this one is not for you. Unless you go all in on microchips so powerful that they enable local LLMs, but even that seems to be outside of the FOSS competency as it involves hardware, which FOSS doesn't usually touch (with the exception of raspberry pi's and some libre phones)

mikkupikku3• 8 months ago

This is precisely the sort of political demand for stagnation that I'm talking about. Doing your best to make RMS proud isn't going to make this technology go away.

bloppe2• 8 months ago

Just because we don't want Mozilla to waste precious resources developing clearly unwanted features does not mean we don't want them to experiment. This isn't experimentation. It's being a sheep.

lone-cloud• 8 months ago

I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.

exographicskip3• 8 months ago

Ladybird might be a good alternative in a couple years

mmaunder• 8 months ago

"We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow."

You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.

fortyseven• 8 months ago

The sidebar where I can integrate my own locally hosted LLM? So I can quickly grab summaries and stuff? THAT'S helpful. The rest, get the hell away.

51Cards• 8 months ago

Please make AI disappear altogether until I want it. No pop-ups, no floating "Help me..." in fields, no spinning flashing icons on toolbars. I submit feedback on all products that do this that I would like a way to turn it all off. AI is useful when I want it, otherwise it's just annoying and gets in my way.

butz• 8 months ago

Got to hold on just for a few more months until Ladybird release. Servo, hopefully will be still catching up. Worst case scenario - move to Dillo.

ulbu• 8 months ago

why not AI integrations that are not built-in but rather externalized like LSP?

themicahshell• 8 months ago

The only people who want AI in anything are AI companies...

boombapoom• 8 months ago

we respect your privacy, except for when we dump it into a publicly shared LLM

mehdibl• 8 months ago

May be Mozilla have a point.

Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.

Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.

duxup• 8 months ago

While back I figured I should support mozilla and I signed up for their VPN. It worked for a while but it felt like a hacky ad-on ontop of mulvad and then it just wouldn't work a lot of the time and I gave up.

I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.

rjurney• 8 months ago

I've tried the Perplexity browser and... I can't figure out what it does or how it is better?

mattmaroon3• 8 months ago

Ugh I hate it. The amount of times I accidentally trigger the ui to summarize the page is so annoying

ph4rsikal• 8 months ago

I want to pull in AI on my own terms and don't want to feel I am constantly watched.

midtake• 8 months ago

I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it need to do AI?

Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.

I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.

gespadas• 8 months ago

I really hope Mozilla open their eyes and ears and LISTEN to their USERS... no one wants AI in Firefox, all we want is a better web browser.

Mozilla, you are still on time to reroute your efforts to regain the users you'd lost by crap like this.

racl101• 8 months ago

At first I thought it was a bit tragic how Apple kinda fumbled AI. Now I think maybe they might have an edge if they were to be one of the only big companies not trying to push it into their products. Especially MacOS.

TZubiri2• 8 months ago

Nono, I want AI in my browser, I put chatgpt.com on the address bar, and I get AI in my browser.

eduction• 8 months ago

I’d love an ai I could ask to pull up a web page I have a scattered memory of - I know what it was about but not the name of the site it was from, not if it’s open in a tab or if I closed it an hour ago, or maybe I bookmarked it. Even better if I can ask things like “can you find that movie review about some robert Downey junior film I read maybe a month ago?”

Whether it will actually do any of those things is another question of course.

hendersoon• 8 months ago

Google approached this the right way. No, not with "ai mode", that sucks. With the Chrome dev tools MCP. You allow AI to control the browser if the user opts-in and sets it up.

riversflow• 8 months ago

moron4hire2• 8 months ago

I mean, 52 people is a significant proportion of Mozilla's entire userbase, so...

guestbest• 8 months ago

I looked at the top 25 grossing apps on iOS and Android. There is only one explicitly ai app and it’s the one that ran a Super Bowl commercial, ChatGPT. I don’t see the demand from regular consumers. When or if it grosses top in the charts then it arrived. It’s more windows 3.0 than windows 95.

Fanofilm• 8 months ago

The onus is on FireFox to deliver "the killer feature". No killer feature, nobody will bother with it. Mozilla needs to shift into entrepreneurial innovation.

Animats• 8 months ago

Unless the AI in a browser can delete all ads for me, I don't want it.

wannabag• 8 months ago

Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of complaints.

I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.

I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.

Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.

squigz• 8 months ago

Lots of people saying things like, "This is not novel; come up with new ways to use this technology!" as if that's easy.

Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!

mmis1000• 8 months ago

I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory when I absolutely don't want it).

Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.

skwee357• 8 months ago

I don’t want AI in my browser. I don’t want AI in my thermostat app. I don’t want AI showed into my face on every website I land.

It honestly feels like a plague worse than ads. At least ads I can block in various ways.

aljgz• 8 months ago

This is going to be disliked, but it's my opinion:

I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.

I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when needed. I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any company that creates a free tool to keep users in their ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?

So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly attached to the old ways.

cyanydeez• 8 months ago

AI = local = cool

AI = cloud = insecure bullshit

jameslk• 8 months ago

I want it, but I have ideas in mind that aren’t just a chat window bolted to a browser.

Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.

We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.

anildash• 8 months ago

I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

tsoukase• 8 months ago

AI in an open source project will be horrible. Proprietary AI services backed by billions, hiring top programming, back/front/ui talent lead by ambitious dreamers are already problematic at most limited. A bunch of loose free lancers in their night time are not the best team to prepare a responsible and competitive AI gateway.

rldjbpin• 8 months ago

AI or not, feels like the focus in the past few years for the browser has been to do catch-up on the trendy feature rather than improving the core experiences.

TBF some of these features are also unique and something i cherish when browsing the web (e.g. container tabs). however, the devs must ask why every "new" browser is just a chromium fork in the end.

there should be a try to pivot to the core experience than feature parity to see if it actually brings more people over.

noisebuffer• 8 months ago

To create an AI that people will want to use, we need people to use it so we get better data, improve it, and learn how to control models. It’s a catch-22. I definitely don’t want AI tabs in Firefox but I can see why all this might be necessary because of massive potential for a superintelligence to solve problems or open new doors we didn’t know existed. But then we have to ask ourselves if these new pathways for humanity are so far removed from what humans can accomplish on their own, is there pride in a new revolution akin to the human derived pride in what we have accomplished on our own for the Industrial Revolution, for example, or even just petrol or nuclear power discovery?

m-p-3• 8 months ago

Personally I don't mind if the purpose is increased privacy and that the processing is done locally.

Some great examples are the local translation engine and I believe they also added or are in the process to add a small engine that can describe images and provide caption on-demand, which is a great step towards accessibility.

BuddyPickett2• 8 months ago

I do. It's nice to have when you want it and ready to not use if you don't. The more options the better. It's also nice when it's built in so you don't have to take extra steps to use it when you want to use it.

BuddyPickett2• 8 months ago

I like having more options and AI is just one more option.

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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