No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/

by MrAlex94 • 7 months ago

564 327 7 months ago

almosthere• 7 months ago

I do think dipping your toes into the future is worth it. If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. But I don't think this is any more dangerous than giving people a browser in the first place. They have already done enough to shoot themselves in the foot enough.

MrAlex943• 7 months ago

I am more of a sceptic of AI in the context of a browser, than its general use. I think LLMs have great utility and have really helped push things along - but it’s not as if they’re completely risk free.

smt88• 7 months ago

I don't mind Mozilla trying to make use of AI, but I'm also glad we have actual competition still.

In many other areas, there are zero "no AI" options at all.

Qem• 7 months ago

If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck.

It's more likely it will try to kill us by talking depressed people into suicide and providing virtual ersatz boyfriends/girlfriends to replace real human relationships, what is a functional equivalent to cyber-neutering, given people can't have children by dating LLMs.

a24j• 7 months ago

Birth rates may fall for those who LLM made unemployable...

SV_BubbleTime• 7 months ago

Just checking but… what if instead of cruel natural selection, we’ve largely eliminated threats like predators and starvation… but still by either necessity or accident are presented with a less cruel more subtle filter?

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491

clueless2• 7 months ago

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

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

1shooner• 7 months ago

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

recursive3• 7 months ago

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

ekr____3• 7 months ago

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

actionfromafar• 7 months ago

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

clueless2• 7 months ago

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

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

account426• 7 months ago

I don't even want translation in my browser.

ThrowawayTestr• 7 months ago

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

infotainment• 7 months ago

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

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

BoredPositron2• 7 months ago

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

_heimdall7• 7 months ago

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

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

xg15• 7 months ago

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

lxgr2• 7 months ago

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

koolala11• 7 months ago

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

api• 7 months ago

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

pferde• 7 months ago

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

isodev• 7 months ago

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

ToucanLoucan• 7 months ago

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

lxgr2• 7 months ago

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

TheRealPomax2• 7 months ago

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

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

nullbound• 7 months ago

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

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

Wowfunhappy3• 7 months ago

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

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

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

dotancohen2• 7 months ago

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

Xelbair• 7 months ago

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

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

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

mindcrash• 7 months ago

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

And now we have:

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

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

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

AuthAuth2• 7 months ago

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

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

reddalo2• 7 months ago

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

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

goalieca• 7 months ago

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

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

tdeck3• 7 months ago

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

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

zwnow• 7 months ago

I think people want AI in the browser

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

csydas• 7 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nottorp5• 7 months ago

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

johnnyanmac5• 7 months ago

I think people want AI in the browser

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

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

zavec3• 7 months ago

I guess it's nice for non-technical people who don't know how to use `about:config` but beyond that I don't really see the need. Hopefully adding that extra layer of indirection doesn't mean the users will have to wait too long for security patches.

ekr____3• 7 months ago

PSA (for the nth time): about:config is not a supported way of configuring Firefox, so if you tweak features with about:config, don't be surprised if those tweaks stop working without warning.

autoexec• 7 months ago

Mozilla tells you to use it so it so that seems supported enough to me (example: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...)

That said, they're admittedly terrible about keeping their documentation updated, letting users know about added/depreciated settings, and they've even been known to go in and modify settings after you've explicitly changed them from defaults, so the PSA isn't entirely unjustified.

tim3333• 7 months ago

Kind of an aside, I mostly use Chrome but I thought I'd give Firefox a go again, Everyone says use tree style tabs but I couldn't get them to display properly without going to about:config to enable custom css and creating a new css file somewhere deep in the file system. It's stuff like that that makes everyone use Chrome.

johnnyanmac5• 7 months ago

about:config is a cat and mouse game, and I don't want to reconfigure my settings everytime Firefox updates. That's just hostile user design.

kevmo3143• 7 months ago

Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic.

This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those AIs. Bergamot's model's behavior is no more or less auditable or a black box than an LLM's behavior. If you really want to go dig into a Llama 7B model, you definitely can. Even Bergamot's underlying model has an option to be transformer-based: https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/

The premise of non-corporate AI is respectable but I don't understand the hate for LLMs. Local inference is laudable, but being close-minded about solutions is not interesting.

jazzyjackson• 7 months ago

It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it.

I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I don't want my language to be pulled towards the average redditor, so I choose not to interact with LLMs (I still use them for code generation, but I wouldn't if I used code for self expression. I just refuse to have a back and forth conversation on any topic. It's like that family that tried raising a chimp alongside a baby. The chimp did pick up some human like behavior, but the baby human adapted to chimp like behavior much faster, so they abandoned the experiment.)

kevmo3143• 7 months ago

Sure, I am more referring to advocating for Bergamot as a type of more "pure" solution.

I have no opinion on not wanting to converse with a machine, that is a perfectly valid preference. I am referring more to the blog post's position where it seems to advocate against itself.

bee_rider2• 7 months ago

I’m not too worried about starting to write like a bot. But, I do notice that I’m sometimes blunt and demanding when I talk to a bot, and I’m worried that could leak through to my normal talking.

I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no feelings). It can be annoying when you bounce the third idea off the thing and it confidently replies with wrong instructions.

Anyway, I’ve been less worried about running local models, mostly just because I’m running them CPU-only. The capacity is just so limited, they don’t enter the uncanny valley where they can become truly annoying.

zdragnar• 7 months ago

You can't really dig into a model you don't control. At least by running locally, you could in theory if it is exposed enough.

The focused purpose, I think, gives it more of a "purpose built tool" feel over "a chatbot that might be better at some tasks than others" generic entity. There's no fake persona to interact with, just an algorithm with data in and out.

The latter portion is less a technical and more an emotional nuance, to be sure, but it's closer to how I prefer to interact with computers, so I guess it kinda works on me... If that were the limit of how they added AI to the browser.

kevmo3143• 7 months ago

Yes I agree with this, but the blog post makes a much more aggressive claim.

Large language models are something else entirely. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn’t sit well.

Like I said, I'm all for local models for the exact reasons you mentioned. I also love the auditability. It strikes me as strange that the blog post would write off the architecture as the problem instead of the fact that it's not local.

The part that doesn't sit well to me is that Mozilla wants to egress data. It being an LLM I really don't care.

_heimdall7• 7 months ago

Running locally does help get less modified output, bit how does it help escape the black box problem?

A local model will have fewer filters applied to the output, but I can still only evaluate the input/output pairs.

CivBase• 7 months ago

I think the author was close to something here but messed up the landing.

To me the difference between something like AI translation and an LLM is that the former is a useful feature and the latter is an annoyance. I want to be able to translate text across languages in my web browser. I don't want a chat bot for my web browser. I don't want a virtual secretary - and even if I did, I wouldn't want it limited to the confines of my web browser.

It's not about whether there is machine learning, LLMs, or any kind of "AI" involved. It's about whether the feature is actually useful. I'm sick of AI non-features getting shoved in my face, begging for my attention.

XorNot3• 7 months ago

Translation AI though has provable behavior cases though: round tripping.

An ideal translation is one which round-trips to the same content, which at least implies a consistency of representation.

No such example or even test as far as I know exists for any of the summary or search AIs since they expressly lose data in processing (I suppose you could construct multiple texts with the same meanings and see if they summarize equivalently - but it's certainly far harder to prove anything).

charcircuit5• 7 months ago

That is not an ideal translation as it prioritizes round tripability over natural word choice or ordering.

hatefulheart• 7 months ago

Your tone is kind of ridiculous.

It’s insane this has to be pointed out to you but here we go.

Hammers are the best, they can drive nails, break down walls and serve as a weapon. From now on the military will, plumber to paratrooper, use nothing but hammers because their combined experience of using hammers will enable us to make better hammers for them to do their tasks with.

Moru2• 7 months ago

No, a tank is obviously better at all those things. They should clearly be used by everyone, including the paratrooper. Never mind the extra fuel costs or weight, all that matters is that it gets the job done best.

PunchyHamster3• 7 months ago

but I don't understand the hate for LLMs.

It's mostly knee-jerk reaction from having AI forced upon us from every direction, not just the ones that make sense

internet_points• 7 months ago

To me it sounds like a reasonable "AI-conservative" position.

(It's weird how people can be so anti-anti-AI, but then when someone takes a middle position, suddenly that's wrong too.)

liampulles• 7 months ago

The local part is the important part here. If we get consumer level hardware that can run general LLM models, there we can actually monitor locally what goes in and what goes out, then it meets the privacy needs/wants of power users.

BizarroLand2• 7 months ago

My take is that I'm ok with anything a company wants to do with their product EXCEPT when they make it opt out or non-opt-outable.

Firefox could have an entire section dedicated to torturing digital puppies built into the platform and... Ok, well, that's too far, but they could have a costco warehouse full of AI crap and I wouldn't mind at all as long as it was off by default and preferably not even downloaded to the system unless I went in and chose to download it.

I know respecting user preference doesn't line their pockets but neither does chasing users down and shoving services they never asked for and explicitly do not want into their faces.

inkysigma• 7 months ago

Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well.

Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense.

I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.

Cheer2171• 7 months ago

No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs).

From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable.

Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.

koolala11• 7 months ago

I'm ok with Translation because it's best solved with AI. I'm not ok with it when Firefox "uses AI to read your open tabs" to do things that don't even need an AI based solution.

user3939382• 7 months ago

Firefox should look like Librewolf first of all, Librewolf shouldn’t have to exist. Mozilla’s privacy stuff is marketing bullshit just like Apple. It shouldn’t be doing ANYTHING that isn’t local only unless it’s explicitly opt in or user UI action oriented. The LLM part is absurd bc the entire overton window is in the wrong place.

PunchyHamster3• 7 months ago

It's frankly desperate trend chasing from management that lost after starting from near total market domination, and have no idea what to do now.

andai3• 7 months ago

As a side note, I was like "Isn't WaterFox the FF fork by that wolf guy?"

Then I thought, "Aha! Surely LibreWolf is the one I'm thinking of!"

Turns out no, it's a third one! It's PaleMoon...

jrjeksjd8d• 7 months ago

To be more charitable to TFA, machine translation is a field where there aren't great alternatives and the downside is pretty limited. If something is in another language you don't read it at all. You can translate a bunch of documents and benchmark the result and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences. Another related area is OCR - there are sometimes mistakes, but it's tractable to create a model and verify it's mostly correct.

LLMs being applied to everything under the sun feels like we're solving problems that have other solutions, and the answers aren't necessarily correct or accurate. I don't need a dubiously accurate summary of an article in English, I can read and comprehend it just fine. The downside is real and the utility is limited.

schoen6• 7 months ago

There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way; it's designed like other programs, according to someone's explicit understanding. There's still active research in this field; I have a friend who's very deep into it.

The trouble is that statistical MT (the things that became neural net MT) started achieving better quality metrics than rule-based MT sometime around 2008 or 2010 (if I remember correctly), and the distance between them has widened since then. Rule-based systems have gotten a little better each year, while statistical systems have gotten a lot better each year, and are also now receiving correspondingly much more investment.

The statistical systems are especially good at using context to disambiguate linguistic ambiguities. When a word has multiple meanings, human beings guess which one is relevant from overall context (merging evidence upwards and downwards from multiple layers within the language understanding process!). Statistical MT systems seem to do something somewhat similar. Much as human beings don't even perceive how we knew which meaning was relevant (but we usually guessed the right one without even thinking about it), these systems usually also guess the right one using highly contextual evidence.

Linguistic example sentences like "time flies like an arrow" (my linguistics professor suggested "I can't wait for her to take me here") are formally susceptible of many different interpretations, each of which can be considered correct, but when we see or hear such sentences within a larger context, we somehow tend to know which interpretation is most relevant and so most plausible. We might never be able to replicate some of that with consciously-engineered rulesets!

onion2k• 7 months ago

and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences

A nefarious model would work that way though. The owner wouldn't want it to be obvious. It'd only change the meaning of some sentences some of the time, but enough to nudge the user's understanding of the translated text to something that the model owner wants.

For example, imagine a model that detects the sentiment of text about Russian military action, and automatically translates it to something a more positive if it's especially negative, but only 20% of the time (maybe ramping up as the model ages). A user wouldn't know, and a someone testing the model for accuracy might assume it's just a poor translation. If such a model became popular it could easily shift the perception of the public a few percent in the owner's preferred direction. That'd be plenty to change world politics.

Likewise for a model translating contracts, or laws, or anything else where the language is complex and requires knowledge of both the language and the domain. Imagine a Chinese model that detects someone trying to translate a contract from Chinese to English, and deliberately modifies any clause about data privacy to change it to be more acceptable. That might be paranoia on my part, but it's entirely possible on a technical level.

ACCount37• 7 months ago

LLMs are great because of exactly that: they solve things that have no other solutions.

(And also things that have other solutions, but where "find and apply that other solution" has way more overhead than "just ask an LLM".)

There is no deterministic way to "summarize this research paper, then evaluate whether the findings are relevant and significant for this thing I'm doing right now", or "crawl this poorly documented codebase, tell me what this module does". And the alternative is sinking your own time in it - while you could be doing something more important or more fun.

tdeck3• 7 months ago

Aside: Does anyone actually use summarization features? I've never once been tempted to "summarize" because when I read something I either want to read the entire thing, or look for something specific. Things I want summarized, like academic papers, already have an abstract or a synopsis.

badbotty• 7 months ago

Haven’t tried them but I can see these features being really useful for screen reader users.

wkat42423• 7 months ago

Yes. I use it sometimes in Firefox with my local LLM server. Sometimes i come across an article I'm curious about but don't have the time or energy to read. Then I get a TL;DR from it. I know it's not perfect but the alternative is not reading it at all.

If it does interest me then I can explore it. I guess I do this once a week or so, not a lot.

simonw• 7 months ago

I occasionally use the "summarize" button on the iPhone Mobile Safari reader view if I land on a blog entry and it's quite long and I want to get a quick idea of if it's worth reading the whole thing or not.

runjake2• 7 months ago

Yes, several times a day. I use summarization for webpages, messages, documents and YouTube videos. It’s super handy.

I mainly use a custom prompt using ChatGPT via the Raycast app and the Raycast browser extension.

That said, I don’t feel comfortable with the level of AI being shoved into browsers by their vendors.

mikestorrent• 7 months ago

In-browser ones? No. With external LLMS? Often. It depends on the purpose of the text.

If the purpose is to read someone's _writing_, then I'm going to read it, for the sheer joy of consuming the language. Nothing will take that from me.

If the purpose is to get some critical piece of information I need quickly, then no, I'd rather ask an AI questions about a long document than read the entire thing. Documentation, long email threads, etc. all lend themselves nicely to the size of a context window.

figmert• 7 months ago

You mean you don't summarize those terrible articles you happen to come across and you're a little intrigued, hoping that there's some substance, and then you read, and it just repeats the same thing over and over again with different wording? Anyway, I sometimes still give them the benefit of the doubt, and end up doing a summary. Often they get summarized into 1 or 2 sentences.

andai3• 7 months ago

Yeah, basically every 15 minute YouTube video, because the amount of actual content I care about is usually 1-2 sentences, and usually ends up being the first sentence of an LLM summary of the transcript.

If something has actual substance I'll watch the whole thing, but that's maybe 10% of videos I find in experience.

cess11• 7 months ago

No, because I know how to search and skim.

mock-possum• 7 months ago

Nah, because anything not worth reading is also not worth summarizing.

lproven3• 7 months ago

No, because an LLM cannot summarise. It can only shorten which is not the same.

Citation: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...

KronisLV• 7 months ago

Yes.

Most recently, a new ISP contract: because it's both low stakes enough where I don't care much about inaccuracies (it's a bog standard contract from a run of the mill ISP), there's basically no information in there that the cloud vendor doesn't already have (if they have my billing details) but also where I'm curious about whether anything might jump out, all while not really wanting to read the 5 pages of the thing.

Just went back to that, it got both all of the main items (pricing, contract terms, my details) correctly, but also the annoying fine print (that I referenced, just in case). Also works pretty well across languages, though that depends on the model in question a bunch.

I feel like if browsers or whatever get the UX of this down, people will upload all sorts of data into those vendors that they normally shouldn't. I also think that with nuanced enough data, we'll eventually have the LLM equivalent of Excel messing up data due to some formatting BS.

tliltocatl• 7 months ago

The thing about translation, even a human translator will sometimes make silly mistakes unless they know the domain really well. So LLM are not any worse. Translation is a problem with no deterministic solution (rule-based translation had always been a bad joke). Properly implemented deterministic search/information retrieval, on the other hand, works extremely well. So well it doesn't really need any replacement - except when you also have some extra dynamics on top like "filtering SEO slop" - and that's not something LLMs can improve at all.

MrAlex943• 7 months ago

Looking back with fresh eyes, I definitely think I could’ve presented what I’m trying to say better.

On a purely technical play, you’re right that I’m drawing a distinction that may not hold up purely on technical grounds. Maybe the better framing is: I trust constrained, single purpose models with somewhat verifiable outputs (seeing text go in, translated text go out, compare its consistency) more than I trust general purpose models with broad access to my browsing context, regardless of whether they’re both neural networks under the hood.

WRT to the “scope”, maybe I have picked up the wrong end of the stick with what Mozilla are planning to do - but they’ve already picked all the low hanging fruit with AI integration with the features you’ve mentioned and the fact they seem to want to dig their heels in further, at least to me, signals that they want deeper integration? Although who knows, the post from the new CEO may also be a litmus test to see what the response to that post elicits, and then go from there.

yunohn5• 7 months ago

I still don’t understand what you mean by “what they do with your data” - because it sounds like exfiltration fear mongering, whereas LLMs are a static series of weights. If you don’t explicitly call your “send_data_to_bad_actor” function with the user’s I/O, nothing can happen.

someothherguyy5• 7 months ago

This feature can be easily disabled with policies:

https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai

https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profil...

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/in...

beached_whale• 7 months ago

Easy for who? 99% of people are not going/able to setup firefox policies.

someothherguyy5• 7 months ago

More than 1% of humans can read and create a file on computer. Others know how to read and use a search engine, and way more can be instructed by a LLM on how to do so.

I would say it is nearly as easy as installing waterfox or some other privacy focused fork of Firefox.

bigstrat2003• 7 months ago

This is like when people defend Windows 11's nonsense by saying "you can disable or remove that stuff". Yes, you can. But you shouldn't have to, and I personally prefer to use tools which don't shove useless things into the tool because it's trendy.

calvinmorrison• 7 months ago

not to mention firefox routinely blows up any policies you set during upgrades, incompatibilities, and an endless about:config that is more opaque than a hunk of room temperature lard.

derekdahmer• 7 months ago

How is this different from linux? People happily spend hours customizing defaults in their OS. It’s usually a point of praise for open source software.

fsflover6• 7 months ago

The difference is that on Windows all unwanted features eventually become mandatory, with no way of switching them off. With Firefox, it never happens.

someothherguyy5• 7 months ago

Well, you aren't the only person using a tool, and it probably matters more to those who are making things "trendy".

In general, how else would people "learn" about a feature unless it was enabled by default or the product nagged them?

koolala11• 7 months ago

Is it really in all 4 of those places? Just need to change it in the first two, right? I hate the new AI tab feature and wish they had a non-AI option.

nitwit0052• 7 months ago

They absolutely know people want that, and absolutely aren't going to add it.

someothherguyy5• 7 months ago

You can disable the one option. I included links to the source code to show the level of preferences you can customize, and how it is processed.

phyzome2• 7 months ago

Even if we ignore things like "they're chasing AI fads instead of better things" and "they're adding attack surface" and so forth, and just focus on the disabling feature toggles thing...

... Mozilla has re-enabled AI-related toggles that people have disabled. (I've heard this from others and observed it myself.) They also keep adding new ones that aren't controlled by a master switch. They're getting pretty user-hostile.

aag• 7 months ago

Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?:

Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.

Glant• 7 months ago

Presumably Google Disco, an experimental AI focused web browser. There's also a few related HN threads but not much discussion.

https://labs.google/disco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952

doubtfuly• 7 months ago

On Windows Mozilla can't even handle disabling hardware acceleration, a.k.a. the GPU, from its settings page. Sure you can toggle the button but it doesn't work as verified in the task manager. What hope is there that they can be trusted to disable AI then? It's a feature that I'd never want enabled. When that "feature" comes out users will be forced to find a fork without the feature.

lerp-io• 7 months ago

A browser is meant to be a user agent, more specifically, your agent on the web.

at this point it’s more so a sandbox runtime bordering an OS, but okay

koolala11• 7 months ago

Did Firefox already add AI into Tabs? Today I just got my first 'Tab Grouping' and it says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". That's the worst way to do grouping ever... just group hierarchically based on where it opened from...

Groxx2• 7 months ago

Particularly since they clearly keep this info around - if you install TreeStyleTabs or Sideberry, you'll see it immediately show the historical-structure of your current tabs (in-process at least, I'm not 100% sure about after kill->restore). That info has to come from somewhere.

koolala11• 7 months ago

I wish there was a Horizontal solution instead of vertical tabs. Maybe someone could mod their AI system with a non-AI backend.

fguerraz• 7 months ago

I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? Just like with Mozilla, they rely on sponsors and you are the product.

aleph_minus_one• 7 months ago

I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point?

What do you say about the following link, then?

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/

Groxx2• 7 months ago

New this year? https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozi...

I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...

AnonC2• 7 months ago

That link is for Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit and donations to it do not go to the development of Firefox. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity, owns and manages Firefox. The way to support Firefox monetarily is by buying Mozilla VPN where available (this is Mullvad in the backend) and buying some Firefox merchandise (like stickers, t-shirts, etc.). I think an MDN Plus subscription also helps.

AnonC2• 7 months ago

As I mentioned in a comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 ), Firefox does not rely only on sponsors. There are a few ways to pay money that goes directly towards Firefox.

benrutter4• 7 months ago

You can give Waterfox your money. Just not for the browser itself. They sell ad free search[0].

[0] https://search.waterfox.net/

hexasquid• 7 months ago

...and keep your hand up if you've ever donated to Firefox

phyzome2• 7 months ago

I gave them over $500 and I sure as hell will never do that again.

atomicfiredoll• 7 months ago

Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page?

Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.

People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.

koolala11• 7 months ago

How do you disable the telemetry in Waterfox? It looks like they get their funding because they partnered with an Ad company. Do I just need to change the default search?

koolala11• 7 months ago

https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-in-2023/

Looks like their independent now, nice.

htx80nerd• 7 months ago

I was a FF driver for ages and now making the switch to Chrome based browser simple because it's faster and websites are all tested against Chrome / Safari. I see both of these issues manifest IRL on a weekly basis. Why do I want to burn up CPU cycles and second using FF when Chromium is literally faster.

SoftTalker• 7 months ago

I use FF because of uBlock Origin, and also because it has built-in support for SOCKS5 proxy connections, which I use to access stuff at work over an ssh tunnel.

webstrand• 7 months ago

Yeah per-tab container socks5 is a killer feature I use every day.

mmaunder• 7 months ago

"...trust from other large, imporant [sic] third parties which in turn has given Waterfox users access to protected streaming services via Widevine."

The black box objection disqualifies Widevine.

human_llm• 7 months ago

Waterfox just released version 6.6.6. Are we sure it is not evil?

chauhankiran• 7 months ago

With this, people will come here and the go. I mean consider the example of many GNU/Linux users I know who use GNU/Linux (or for them Linux means Ubuntu) system and can ask them to try out Waterfox. But, about installation - can't we have .deb? I know we can easily install from tarball and then setup the .desktop file and then adjust the icon to properly display, and what not...But, Can we make a bit simpler to try?

nirui• 7 months ago

Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you... Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future.
If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along.

This is basically their train of thought: provide something different for people who truly need it. There's nothing to criticize about.

However, let's don't forget that other browsers can remove/disable AI features just as fast as they add them. If Waterfox wants to be *more than just an alternative* (a.k.a. be a competitor), they needs discover what people actually need and optimize heavily on that. But this is hard to do because people don't show their true motives.

Maybe one day, it turned out that people do just want an AI that "think for them". That would be awkward, to say the least.

pdyc• 7 months ago

how is adding ai chat different than asking search engine? I think mozilla wants to make sure that it gets some cut for sending queries to ai similar to their existing revenue model where they get cut for sending it to google. Similar to SE's users should have a choice to use any ai or not.

vivzkestrel• 7 months ago

if kagi can make a search engine that charges users, why dont we have a 1$/month open source browser whose code can be verified but people pay to use monthly?

benrutter4• 7 months ago

I guess that wouldn't really "open source" in the traditional sense, but that's clearly a tangent.

Personally, I'd love a paid for high quality browser that serves me rather than sneakily trying to get me to look at ads.

I think the challenge is that a browser is an incredibly difficult and large thing to build and maintain. So there aren't many wholly new browsers in existence, and therefore not very many business models being tried out.

Full agreement that I'd pay for such a thing- I have a browser and a terminal open non-stop during my workday. It's an important tool and I'd easily pay for a better offering if that was an option.

speedgoose• 7 months ago

Would it be profitable without some heavy investments ?

https://kagi.com/stats

Orygin3• 7 months ago

Paying to get a browser fork with less features? At that point, just pay $1 to Mozilla for firefox instead..

johnnyanmac5• 7 months ago

If they support it and have an incentive to listen to their customers and not shareholders, gladly. We can't keep using those logic of being afraid to invest then be mad when companies find someone who will.

SideburnsOfDoom• 7 months ago

I just downloaded WaterFox, it looks nice.

When they say "AI browsers are proliferating." and "Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers." what does that mean? What's an "AI Browser", and are they really gaining significant market share? For what?

I found this (1) that suggests that several "AI Browsers" exist, which is "proliferating" in a sense.

1) https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...

renegat0x0• 7 months ago

A browser is a tool that allows you to browse the internet. It should be able to display HTML elements, and stuff.

LLMs are also a tool, but it is not necessary for web browsing. It should be installed into a browser as extension, or integrated as such, so it should be quite easily enabled, or disabled. Surely it should not be intertwined with the browser in a meaningful way imho.

rythie• 7 months ago

Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.

benrutter4• 7 months ago

That's true, but as a Waterfox user, I'm not worried!

If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.

reddalo2• 7 months ago

I'll just find a new browser.

The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome.

Etherlord87• 7 months ago

If most people move from Firefox to Waterfox, then Waterfox can acquire Firefox devs, no? Obviously it comes to money, but the first step to gain funding is to gain popularity...

zmmmmm• 7 months ago

I just want FireFox to focus on building an absolutely awesome plugin API that exposes as much power and flexibility as possible - with the best possible security sandbox and permissions model to go with it.

Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.

sigmoid10• 7 months ago

I just want a browser that lets me easily install a good adblocker on all my operating systems. I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature, because I will probably just disable it immediately anyway. But the nr 1 thing I use every day on every single site I visit is an adblocker. I'm always baffled when people complain about ads on mobile or something, because I literally haven't watched ads in decades now.

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature

At some point Firefox added these gaps on the URL bar, every single time I install Firefox I have to go out of my way to delete the spacing, it drives me up a wall.

pbhjpbhj• 7 months ago

They've been quite forceful in the past in pushing 'plugins' by integrating them and turning them on repeatedly when people turned them off.

Did that achieve the last CEOs goals? Presumably if it did they'll use that route again.

Have Google required a default 'on' for Gemini use?

moffkalast• 7 months ago

I just want them to fix their goddamn rendering.

LandR• 7 months ago

I just want an adblocker and tree style vertical tabs, where the tab bar minimises when the mouse isn't over it.

That's literally my entire use case for using firefox.

Arisaka1• 7 months ago

Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.

The current trajectory of products with integrated online worries me, due to the fact that the average computer/phone user isn't as tech-savvy as the average HN reader, to the point where they are unable to toggle stuff they genuinely never asked for, but they begrudgingly accept them because they're... there.

My mother complained about AI mode on Google Chrome, and the "press tab" on the address bar, but she's old and doesn't even know how to connect to the Wi-Fi. Are we safe to assume that she belongs to the percentage of Google Chrome users that they embrace AI, based on the fact that she doesn't know how to turn it off, and there's no easy way to go about it?

I'm willing to bet that Google's reports will assume so, and demonstrate a wide adoption of AI by Chrome users to stakeholders, which will be leveraged as a fact that everyone loves it.

rixed• 7 months ago

I, for one, am dreaming of AI assisted ad removal, content summaries, bookmarks automatic classification...

graycat• 7 months ago

As I read the post by MrAlex94, I noticed a remark that the browser Chrome is good as a user agent. To me, that's terrific! Looks like I'll have to consider Chrome again.`

Here are what I find as reasons to scream about Mozilla:

Popups:

(a) Several times a day, my attention and concentration get interrupted by, for me, the unwelcome announcement that there is a new version I can download. A new version can have changes I don't like and genuine bugs. Sure, I could keep a copy of my favorite version from history, but that is system management mud wrestling and interruption of my work.

(b) Now I get told several times a day that my computer and cell phone can share access to a Web page. In this action Mozilla covers up what that page was showing I wanted it to show. No thanks. When I'm at my computer, AMD 8 core processor, all my files and software tools, and 1 Gbps optical fiber connection to the Internet and looking at a Web page, I want nothing to do with a cell phone's presentation of a, that, Web page.

(c) Some URLs are a dozen lines long and Mozilla finds ways to present such URLs with all their lines and pursue clearly their main objective -- cover up the desired content.

Mozilla needs to make their covering up, changing, the screen optional or just eliminated.

Want me to donate? You've mentioned as little as $10. Deal: Raise the $10 by a factor of 5 AND quit covering up my content and interrupting my work, and we've got a deal.

hansmayer• 7 months ago

I completely agree with the main sentiment, which is - I want the browser to be a User Agent and nothing else. I don´t need a crappy, un-reliable intermediary between the already perfectly fine UA and the Internet.

krige• 7 months ago

Also see related statement by vivaldi: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198

stalfosknight• 7 months ago

That roadmap is luscious.

b00ty4breakfast• 7 months ago

I switched to Waterfox about a year ago because my poor old linux box just couldn't keep up with the latest Firefox version (especially the Snap package! I literally unusable for me) and I am very thankful that they aren't going to be including any of the LLM crud that Mozilla has been talking up.

I get the utility that this stuff can have for certain types of activities but on top of not having great hardware to run the dang things, I just don't find any of the proposed use-cases that compelling for me personally.

It's just nice that the totalizing self-insistence of AI tech hasn't gobbled up every corner of the tech space, even if those crevices and niches are getting smaller by the day.

otikik2• 7 months ago

AI browsers are proliferating

Are they, though? I get bombarded by AI ads very frequently and I have yet to see anything from those "AI browsers" mentioned on the article.

viraptor2• 7 months ago

https://www.perplexity.ai/comet

https://chatgpt.com/atlas/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode

https://www.genspark.ai/browser

https://www.operaneon.com/

https://www.diabrowser.com/

https://fellou.ai/

And many many more...

Maxion• 7 months ago

Do they have any users, though?

countWSS• 7 months ago

The problem with this is integration: no one would complain if it was an official plugin/extension, but integrating this plugin into Firefox is forced and unexpected decision. Firefox telemetry,labs/experiments and server-dependent features will lose it marketshare slowly in favor of local-only browsers that don't have online dependencies or forced bloatware. Like many i've switched long ago to LibreWolf.

dumbfounder• 7 months ago

“Even if you can disable individual AI features, the cognitive load of monitoring an opaque system that’s supposedly working on your behalf would be overwhelming.”

99.9% of people haven’t ever had one single thought about how their software works. I don’t think they will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. Quite the opposite.

insin• 7 months ago

If people could get into the habit of using "AI*" when they explicitly mean "LLM" but they have to say "AI" because hype, that would be nice.

tim3333• 7 months ago

It gets complicated. The * leads to

"* The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither."

And Bergamot is also a transformer based language model.

kogasa240p• 7 months ago

Good stuff. Bit unrelated but I am excited for the imminent wave of lightweight Servo based browsers, will finally let people break free from the Blink/Gecko duopoly.

Fairburn• 7 months ago

Lets be real. As someone pointed out, browsers are black boxes, regardless of who made/forked a browser family. Unless you make it yourself, we will forever be a dog chasing its tail. I would love to believe in the best of whichever I choose. And use it according to my comfort level.

No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

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