tliltocatlan hour ago
I think people screaming "but AI is the future" doesn't recognize what the problem is. The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core. There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those. Stop pushing bells and whistles. Give us more extensibility instead. Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more. There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
And yea, having a faint through about removing adblock support, yet alone speaking it aloud is a really bad sign for Mozilla's future.
mrweasel18 minutes ago
It might open up for a terrifying level of abuse, but if you can have Dtrace and eBPF implemented in the Linux kernel, you can surely design an API for allowing AIs to be plug-able within Firefox.
Firefox is already a really good browser, Mozilla really should be focusing on that. They can design and implement an AI plugin system to go into that core. People who want AI can install an agent and enable the AI sub-system. If the AI companies won't implement it, Mozilla can do it and charge a fee for the plugin.
echelon34 minutes ago
> people screaming "but AI is the future"
I witnes far more people screaming against AI.
The media started kicking this off in 2021, 2022. It blossomed into a fully distributed, organic, memetic device from there. It has a life of its own now.
Children and young people are practically indoctrinated if you look at social media comments.
I was invited to give lectures to several art schools about using Blender, Unreal Engine, and mocap software with diffusion models. The students weren't very polite. Most of the "questions" I got at each of the campuses were simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI.
Good looking and well-reviewed indie games that incorporate AI elements or tools are dumped on by these folks. It's like butting into conversations to say something bad about AI scores points or something.
> Mozilla keeps jumping on fads
Agreed on this point, though. They're rudderless. And Google is probably quite happy about the fact that their antitrust litigation sponge can't steal away their users.
ehnto4 minutes ago
There is a clear substance behind the pushback on AI in creative work, and it would be foolish to dismiss it as irrational. You might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus too much in implementation details, the dislike for is AI is a bit deeper than that.
tliltocatl24 minutes ago
If you keep shoveling a thing to people who don't care, you'll get tons of irrational pushback no matter how the good this thing is. And AI isn't even particularly good.
epgui28 minutes ago
> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI
I wonder what that might mean!
bannana20333 minutes ago
Average Joe or Joan will install some crap AI assisted browser if some idiot in Tiktok or FB says follow me and I will DM you a special link to get baby-clothes for -10% discount. Hope your family is not that. My spouse despite reading HN etc thinks that anyway privacy is lost - so why notget at least that 10% discount.
Another problem for Mozilla:
- If they don't pivot to AI people will leave it. Yes, some hardcore RMS fans will use some clone of Firefox - all others will not
- If they adopt modern AI people scream
- Same happened when Mozilla accepted DRM (for Netflix etc). Many tech writers, commentators were against that. But if Firefox did not adopt it then all those tech writers would have used Chrome to see Netflix. No one of these commentators say they will boycott Netflix.
samschooler15 hours ago
I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser. While still staying the best foil to Chrome (both in browser engine, browser chrome, and extension ecosystem).
klardotsh3 hours ago
Fully disagree. I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one. Why do I need them in my browser, and why does my browser need to focus on something that, several years into the hype wave, I still *do not use at all*? And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I'd be elated if Firefox solely focused on "the pre-AI era", as you put it, and many other power users would, too. And I somehow doubt my non-techie family cares - if anything, they're tired of seeing the stupid sparkle icons crammed down their throats at every single corner of the world now.
Spacecosmonaut43 minutes ago
AI tools are here to stay. They will start to creep into everything, everywhere, all the time. Either you recognize the moment at which it becomes a significant disadvantage not to use them (I agree that moment is not now), or get left behind.
runarberg30 minutes ago
AI crap has already been crammed into everything for months now, and nobody like it nor wants it. There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.
zwnowan hour ago
I agree, why support pushing the masses into another big tech machinery that just rips off their data and collectively makes it worse for all of us again? We are already way too cool with people frying their brains on X, TikTok, Instagram and whatnot. If anything, as devs, we should help people get back to focus on their own lifes over monetization of attentionspans. But this industry has no backbone and is constantly letting people down for a quick buck.
wvenable3 hours ago
> I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I recently listened to a podcast (probably The Verge) talking about how an author was suddenly getting more purchases from his personal website. He attributed it to AI chatbots giving his personal website as the best place to buy rather than Amazon, etc. An AI browser might be a way to take power away from all the big players.
> And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I suspect I only Google for about 1/4 of things I used to (maybe less). Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
While I am a techie and I do use Firefox -- that's not a growing niche. I think AI will become spectacularly better for non-techies because it can simply give them what they ask for. LLMs have solved the natural language query issue.
entropy472 hours ago
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
wvenable2 hours ago
Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
entropy472 hours ago
> Why ... wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
Funnily enough, this is exactly how I justify Googling stuff instead of asking Gemini. Different strokes I guess!
happymellon2 hours ago
> > I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I had to use a ledger database at work for audit trails because they were hotness. I think we were one of the few that actually used AWS QLDB.
The experience I've had with people submitting AI generated code has been poor. Poor performing code, poor quality code using deprecated methods and overly complex functionality, and then poor understanding of why the various models chose to do it that way.
I've not actually seen a selling point for me, and "because Google is enshittifying its searches" is pretty weak.
wvenable2 hours ago
I've been posting recently how I refactored a few different code bases with the help of AI. Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller. AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe: incredibly powerful but only if you understand exactly what you're doing otherwise it will happily make a big mess.
protocolture7 hours ago
> Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
Strongly disagree.
Theres no expectation of AI as a core browsing experience. There isnt even really an expectation of AI as part of an extended browsing experience. We cant even predict reliably what AI's relationship to browsing will be if it is even to exist. Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
Firefox can absolutely maintain "It just works" by being a good platform with well tested in demand features.
What they are talking about here, are opt out only experiments intruding on the core browsing experience. Thats the opposite of "It Just Works".
>I know Mozilla doesn't have much good will right now, but hopefully with the exec shakeup, they will right the ship on making FF a great browser.
Its already a great browser. It doesnt need a built in opt out AI experience to become great.
mcny5 hours ago
There was also no expectation of process isolation in Mozilla Firefox when Google Chrome first came into the scenes. Electrolysis was painful for Mozilla and yet it was necessary.
protocolture5 hours ago
So instead of being flexible enough to adapt to new requirements as users demand them, they are blindly implementing things before they are requested just in case?
heavyset_go5 hours ago
Believe it or not well-intentioned developers, product managers, etc can read the writing on the wall and see where user expectations are heading based on the apps and products they already use.
protocolture5 hours ago
Exactly why I am baffled. You would think they could read the writing on the wall.
heavyset_go4 hours ago
I don't like it, but ChatGPT is a product that nearly a billion people are using. It's broken into popular culture. My mom, who has trouble sending an email, uses it. She found it on her own.
More importantly, generative AI is incredibly popular with younger cohorts. They will grow up to be your customer base if they aren't already. Their expectations are being set now.
Again, I don't like it, but that's the reality.
bondarchukan hour ago
Video games are incredibly popular and my mom plays them, does that mean Firefox should have video games baked in at the base layer?
therouwboat2 hours ago
Co-worker was talking about how he tried to make invitation card with chatgpt, just a picture of his house and text and AI failed to do it. It said he didn't have copyright to the picture and used another random pic, layout was wrong etc. Then younger co-worker gave tips how to do it, what tools to use and offered to make it with his better AI program.
What could be done in few minutes with a free program is now multiple hours with billion dollar AI tools and you have less control what the end result is.
7bit42 minutes ago
Obviously your co-worker was not able to do it in a few minutes with a free program, or he would just have done it this way.
protocolture4 hours ago
Quoting myself from another thread.
> I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
> I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
Being against the random inclusion of AI in the browser, isnt the same as being against AI completely. It needs to justify its presence.
krisgenre4 hours ago
+ Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini. It has already become the de facto standard for learning. AI in browsers is inevitable.
protocolture3 hours ago
"Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini"
Yes.
"It has already become the de facto standard for learning."
Maybe.
"AI in browsers is inevitable."
Why. How does that follow. It seems like ChatGPT and Gemini are already working fine, what does the integration add?
robryan2 hours ago
And assuming people want deeper integration is the browser even the right level of abstraction? Arguably it would be better to have something that was operating at the OS level, like siri/gemini assistant style.
rockskon4 hours ago
?????
Why does the existance of an AI chat box website mean a browser must do more than take you to that website?
The forceful inclusion of LLMs in places that have no value are simultaneously ubiquitous and obnoxious.
darkwater2 hours ago
"why do I have to go and fill with copy paste that form or navigate through that page to do $something if that AI browser can do it for me?"
And in that scenario, there is a GIGANTIC need for a user-first, privacy-respecting browser using ideally local models (in a few years, when HW is ready)
rockskon2 hours ago
Again: ???????
You people need to be forced to use your product in the exact form your product is presented to end users. With the exact frequency it's presented to end users. In all the wrong places as it is presented to end users.
Maybe then you'll understand why shoving AI in every conceivable crevice is incredibly obnoxious and distracting and, most importantly, not useful.
darkwateran hour ago
Shoving an AI agent in every website is distracting and not that useful. Shoving an AI agent in every app is distracting as well.
Having one global AI agent per operating system or browser (where most of the digital life happens, in the case of desktop browsers), for the people that want to have an AI agent, it's probably going to be useful, if well implemented.
[deleted]4 hours agocollapsed
charcircuit2 hours ago
This is how Firefox fell behind Chrome and bled their entire market share. The strategy of letting Chrome out innovate them and then copy what they think is good is not a strategy that works.
amethystan hour ago
It works pretty well for Apple
Izkata2 hours ago
> Mozilla could reliably wait 24 months and follow if features are actually in demand and being used.
I'm also wondering how much of what they come up with could be implemented as an addon instead of a core part of the browser.
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.
>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.
If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".
Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
nottorp2 hours ago
> 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans
It's not great. Great would be "we'll stop wasting money on extraneous features and we'll concentrate on making Firefox the best browser".
This is damage control.
MisterTea11 hours ago
> this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
Why though? Seriously.
wkat424210 hours ago
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
rhdunn12 minutes ago
We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.
I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.
Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.
On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.
sigmar11 hours ago
Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes, I have an extension for that.
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.
And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.
azangruan hour ago
> Do you ever...
There probably is a big difference between 'do you ever' and 'how often do you'.
I very rarely visit websites that I want translated; so rarely that I can tolerate google translate, or copying and pasting a section of a page into a tab with gemini; so on its own, this feature wouldn't sell me a browser. Besides, as a sibling comment says, even the current non-AI-enhanced browsers offer, sometimes too intrusively, to translate a page in a non-matching language. At least Chrome does this to me.
Your second scenario happens much more frequently; but again, it is so frictionless to type the term or a phrase in a search box in another tab that I never find myself wishing for a dedicated panel in the browser that could do this for me.
Your third scenario, for me, is finding something in api docs. Like, what's that command again to git cherry-pick a range of commits? So far, just googling this stuff or asking copilot / gemini in a separate tab has always worked. I am not sure I would be upset at a browser that didn't have an inbuilt tool for doing this.
What I do want from a web browser is evergreenness, the quickest and fullest adoption of all the web specs, and great web developer tools.
MisterTea11 hours ago
> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
Yeah. And?
> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.
These are incredibly poor AI sells...
sigmar11 hours ago
>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.
yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.
rochav10 hours ago
Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.
MisterTea10 hours ago
This is exactly it.
brooke2k10 hours ago
"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.
PaulHoule10 hours ago
LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.
For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:
I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone
I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?
When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?r7214 hours ago
>Starting today, Google Translate uses advanced Gemini capabilities to better improve translations on phrases with more nuanced meanings like idioms, local expressions or slang.
https://blog.google/products/search/gemini-capabilities-tran... [Dec 12, 2025]
tjpnz7 hours ago
I think it's simpler than that. AI is fast becoming synonymous with something being force fed and generally unwanted.
alerighian hour ago
Nowadays they call AI everything. Browsers translate websites from decades, when AI was only a word you would see in science fiction movies.
cadamsdotcom10 hours ago
That’s different from an agentic browser in a few key ways.
Most importantly it’s far more difficult for a bad actor to abuse language translation features than agentic browser features.
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine
- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.
- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.
- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.
- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.
There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.
gilrain8 hours ago
Alternatively: they’re already taking advantage of the AI features they like without at all needing “AI in the browser” and do realise it.
majormajor4 hours ago
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?
This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."
>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?
I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.
>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?
This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."
I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.
Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...
throwaway6137458 hours ago
Because the future and market is certain, don’t you know?
chironjitan hour ago
I'm surprised your take is so controversial. This really is it - yes, the current core users are not interested in AI but most people in our lives who are not techies do use them, and Firefox needs win these users if it wants to stay relevant.
Of course, I have opinions on other ways it could make money instead of jumping on the latest hot thing (pocket, fakespot, VPN, etc) without actually truly building the ecosystem but at least they are trying.
Melatonic4 hours ago
Why does the browser itself need AI features ?
You can still easily visit chagpt via web if Gemini or whatever
andai2 hours ago
At this point they should just bring back Eich and go fully trad ;)
brokencode10 hours ago
I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.
I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
protocolture6 hours ago
>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.
Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
charcircuit2 hours ago
The evidence is the billions of people who copy text to and from ChatGPT to other web pages.
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
>but I personally find it very helpful.
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
heavyset_go5 hours ago
It is already optional in Firefox, this is just FUD
johnnyanmac5 hours ago
The FUD is the implications of making it opt out, with reports that there's already other features that requires changing the settings/flags in order to "opt out".
It's doubt based on previous actions.
bayindirh10 hours ago
Considering pirating the whole internet and boiling the planet is required to summarize a single page in a mediocre manner, it’s understandable that people who knows how the sausages are made are against it.
brokencode10 hours ago
We need some regulation on them for sure. They should be paying for the content they train on and use in their search results.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
inferiorhuman5 hours ago
They’re still very compelling as a user.
kgwxd10 hours ago
then you can install an extension.
brokencode9 hours ago
I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
ruicraveiro5 hours ago
If I wanted the average browser, I would have stuck with Chrome, or Edge.
nektro2 hours ago
> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
LOL
andrepd12 hours ago
> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.
The confidence with which people say these things...
s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.
wvenable3 hours ago
Comparing LLMs to NFT isn't fair. Being able to talk to you computer and have it understand you and even do the things you ask is literally StarTrek technology.
I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.
sethops111 hours ago
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
AuthAuth12 hours ago
NFT was always a meme and crypto has proven its staying power.
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
pessimizer10 hours ago
Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.
tock4 hours ago
Crypto is going to be a new settlement layer thats it. You'll use stripe and they will settle it on their public chain. You are free to use the chain directly but no real consumer is going to do that.
AuthAuth8 hours ago
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
amake8 hours ago
> day to day transactions
Where is this happening?
shakna6 hours ago
Money laundering? Certainly.
Black market goods? Of course.
Avoiding taxation? Absolutely.
Day to day purchases? Not that I've seen.
protocolture11 hours ago
NFT was a meme in "People are going to buy my jpeg"
But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.
Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.
gigel8215 hours ago
I'd love to live in your world for a bit... I can't imagine any future where having AI in your browser is a net positive for any user. It sounds like an absolute dystopian privacy and security nightmare.
tgsovlerkhgsel13 hours ago
Why?
Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times".
Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
johnnyanmac9 hours ago
>Why?
Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?
I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.
>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.
>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"
Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.
>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?
No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.
meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.
evil-olive7 hours ago
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM
sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.
but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:
> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.
if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.
but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.
that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.
0: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
gooob3 hours ago
not to mention the high resource-usage of a local LLM that most PCs wouldn't be able to handle, or would just drain a laptop's battery.
M2Ys4U5 hours ago
>Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
but.. why? I can read the website myself. That's why I'm on the website.
charcircuit2 hours ago
People have a limited amount of time, so they may prefer spending it on something else than what a computer can do for them.
tsimionescu12 hours ago
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.
Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
AuthAuth12 hours ago
Most laptops are now shipping with a NPU for handling these tasks. So it wont be getting computed on your GPU.
tsimionescu11 hours ago
That doesn't mean anything, it's just a name change. They're the same kind of unit.
And whatever accelerator you try to put into it, you're not running Gemini3 or GPT-5.1 on your laptop, not in any reasonable time frame.
Intermernet11 hours ago
Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.
I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.
People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.
tsimionescu4 hours ago
Time will tell, but right now we're not solving the problem of running LLMs by increasing efficiency, we're solving it by massive, unprecedented investments in compute power and just power. Companies definitely weren't building nuclear power stations to power their spell checkers or even 3D renderers. LLMs are unprecedented in this way.
[deleted]6 hours agocollapsed
AuthAuth11 hours ago
Also it does mean something. An NPU is completely different from your 5070. Yes the 5070 has specific AI cores but it also has raster cores and other things not present in an NPU.
You dont need to run GPT5.1 to summerize a webpage. Models are small and specialized for different tasks.
tsimionescu4 hours ago
And all of that is irrelevant for the AI use case. The NPU is at best slightly more efficient than a GPU for this use case, and mostly its just cheaper by forgoing various parts of a GPU that are not useful for AI (and would not be used during inferencing anyway).
And the examples being given of why you'd want AI in your browser are all general text comprehension and conversational discussions about that text, applied to whatever I may be browsing. It doesn't really get less specialized than that.
heavyset_go5 hours ago
No, NPUs are designed to be power efficient in ways GPU compute aren't.
You also don't need Gemini3 or GPT anything running locally.
tsimionescu4 hours ago
Personally, I don't need AI in my browser at all. But if I did, why would I want to run a crappy model that can't think and hallucinates constantly, instead of using a better model that kinda thinks and doesn't hallucinate quite as often?
heavyset_go4 hours ago
I generally agree with you, but you'd be surprised at what lower parameter models can accomplish.
I've got Nemo 3 running on an iGPU on a shitty laptop with SO-DIMM memory, and it's good enough for my tasks that I have no use for cloud models.
Similarly, Granite 4 based models are even smaller, just a couple of gigabytes and are capable of automation tasks, summarization, translation, research etc someone might want in a browser.
Both do chain of reasoning / "thinking", both are fast, and once NPU support lands in runtimes, they can be offloaded on to more efficient hardware.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least in my experience, fuzzy accuracy / stochastic inaccuracy is good enough for some tasks.
starik3611 hours ago
That's the point. For things like summarizing a webpage or letting the user ask questions about it, not that much computation is required.
An 8B Ollama model installed on a middle of the road MacBook can do this effortlessly today without whirring. In several years, it will probably be all laptops.
tsimionescu4 hours ago
You can just look down thread at what people actually expect to do - certainly not (just) text summarization. And even for summarization, if you want it to work for any web page (history blog, cooking description, github project, math paper, quantum computing breakthrough), and you want it accurate, you will certainly need way more than Ollama 8B. Add local image processing (since huge amounts of content are not understandable or summarizable if you can't understand images used in the content), and you'll see that for a real 99% solution you need models that will not run locally even in very wild dreams.
skydhash11 hours ago
But what you would want to summarize a page. If I'm reading a blog, that means that I want to read it, not just a condensed version that might miss the exact information I need for an insight or create something that was never there.
AlotOfReading10 hours ago
You can also just skim it. It feels like LLM summarization boils down to an argument to substitute technology for media literacy.
Plus, the latency on current APIs is often on the order of seconds, on top of whatever the page load time is. We know from decades [0] of research that users don't wait seconds.
CamperBob210 hours ago
It makes a big difference when the query runs in a sidebar without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
johnnyanmac9 hours ago
> without closing the tab, opening a new one, or otherwise distracting your attention.
well, 2/3 is admirable in this day and age.
CamperBob210 hours ago
You don't use it to summarize pages (or at least I don't), but to help understand content within a page while minimizing distractions.
For example: I was browsing a Reddit thread a few hours ago and came upon a comment to the effect of "Bertrand Russell argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets at the end of WWII." That seemed to conflict with my prior understanding of Bertrand Russell, to say the least. I figured the poster had confused Russell with von Neumann or Curtis LeMay or somebody, but I didn't want to blow off the comment entirely in case I'd missed something.
So I highlighted the comment, right-clicked, and selected "Explain this." Instead of having to spend several minutes or more going down various Google/Wikipedia rabbit holes in another tab or window, the sidebar immediately popped up with a more nuanced explanation of Russell's actual position (which was very poorly represented by the Reddit comment but not 100% out of line with it), complete with citations, along with further notes on how his views evolved over the next few years.
It goes without saying how useful this feature is when looking over a math-heavy paper. I sure wish it worked in Acrobat Reader. And I hope a bunch of ludds don't browbeat Mozilla into removing the feature or making it harder to use.
homebrewer10 hours ago
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
Why waste time and energy on the lying machine in the first place? Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
It fabricated three different quotes in a row, none of them right. One of them was supposedly from a book that doesn't really exist.
So I resorted to a google search and found what I needed in less time it took to fight that thing.
CamperBob210 hours ago
And this explanation is very likely to be entirely hallucinated, or worse, subtly wrong in ways that's not obvious if you're not already well versed in the subject. So if you care about the truth even a little bit, you then have to go and recheck everything it has "said".
It cited its sources, which is certainly more than you've done.
Just yesterday I asked "PhD-level intelligence" for a well known quote from a famous person because I wasn't able to find it quickly in wikiquotes.
In my experience this means that you typed a poorly-formed question into the free instant version of ChatGPT, got an answer worthy of the effort you put into it, and drew a sweeping conclusion that you will now stand by for the next 2-3 years until cognitive dissonance finally catches up with you. But now I'm the one who's making stuff up, I guess.
homebrewer9 hours ago
Unless you've then read through those sources — and not asked the machine to summarize them again — I don't see how that changes anything.
Judging by your tone and several assumptions based on nothing I see that you're fully converted. No reason to keep talking past each other.
CamperBob29 hours ago
No, I'm not "fully converted." I reject the notion that you have to join one cult or the other when it comes to this stuff.
I think we've all seen plenty of hallucinated sources, no argument there. Source hallucination wasn't a problem 2-3 years ago simply because LLMs couldn't cite their sources at all. It was a massive problem 1-2 years ago because it happened all the freaking time. It is a much smaller problem today. It still happens too often, especially with the weaker models.
I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
In my example, no, I didn't bother confirming the Russell sources in detail, other than to check that they (a) existed and (b) weren't completely irrelevant. I had other stuff to do and don't actually care that much. The comment just struck me as weird, and now I'm better informed thanks to Firefox's AI feature. My takeaway wasn't "Russell wanted to nuke the Russians," but rather "Russell's positions on pacifism and aggression were more nuanced than I thought. Remember to look into this further when/if it comes up again." Where's the harm in that?
Can you share what you asked, and what model you were using? I like to collect benchmark questions that show where progress is and is not happening. If your question actually elicited such a crappy response from a leading-edge reasoning model, it sounds like a good one. But if you really did just issue a throwaway prompt to a free/instant model, then trust me, you got a very wrong impression of where the state of the art really is. The free ChatGPT is inexcusably bad. It was still miscounting the r's in "Strawberry" as late as 5.1.
tsimionescu4 hours ago
> I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.
And here you get back to my original point: to get good (or at least better) AI, you need complex and huge models, that can't realistically run locally.
johnnyanmac9 hours ago
Sure. Let's solve our memory crisis without triggering WW3 with China over Taiwan first, and maybe then we can talk about adding even more expensive silicon to increasingly expensive laptops.
nemomarx13 hours ago
That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?
mcjiggerlog11 hours ago
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".
They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...
ares6239 hours ago
Lots of imagining here.
gigel8213 hours ago
For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.
Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).
I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.
invl7 hours ago
I have already clicked the all-caps button
username2238 hours ago
> Imagine you have an AI button.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
afavour14 hours ago
Most users are entirely ignorant of privacy and security and will make choices without considering it. I don’t say that to excuse it but it’s absolutely the reality.
knowitnone37 hours ago
I don't know. What if the AI can remove all junk from the page, clean it up, and only leave the content - sort of like ublock origin on steroids?
hollerith7 hours ago
I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.
Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)
doctorpangloss5 hours ago
haha, what if I told you that the currently existing, shipping product, "ChatGPT / Gemini uses a browser for you" will have more users than Firefox in two years? I will even bet you that will likely be the case in 2 months.
cvoss12 hours ago
> any future
> any user
heavyset_go5 hours ago
The absolute reactionary response to anything Mozilla does is quite the something to watch, I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
If you read the Mozilla and Firefox related threads over the past week, you'd think Mozilla was the scourge of the internet, worse than DoubleClick in their heyday and worse than Google's hobbling of Chrome.
That said, the AI options for Firefox are opt-in. If you don't want them, don't use them. You are correct in that this is where software is heading, and AI integration is what users will expect going forward.
1gn154 hours ago
Just so everyone else knows, the complaining is by definition reactionary.
> In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
But I guess HackerNews is infamous for being conservative, so it's not too surprising.
thisislife23 hours ago
> I've never seen another company held to the same standards.
The only "standard" expected from them is the same as any other for-profit company - "stick to your stated values and don't be duplicitous". For example, Apple, Meta, Microsoft are all lambasted here when they claim to "respect" user privacy and their products do the opposite.
Also, you should note that unlike these BiGTech that make multiple products and services, the company behind Firefox (and Thunderbird) makes only a few products and earns 100's of millions of dollars in annual revenue from it (some here in HN say they currently make more than a half a billion dollars a year now!). That's a lot of money. And yet, most of their products continues to be "shitty" (i.e. subpar). That's why they are losing user base. Instead of really improving their core product, the company just continues to seek new avenues of creating revenues. That's the "MBA CEO mindset" that everyone here in HN usually complain about. Do you want a browser that's faster and light on resources, or a browser that would display even more ads to you right in the browser? (Guess what Firefox prioritised?). Every user of Firefox can already avail ChatGPT (or some other AI service) if they want to. The only reason to embed it onto Firefox is to just make extra money by violating user privacy (we all know AIs are now personal data harvesters), without adding any real value to the browser.
Now, consider the opensource philosophy they espouse. Again, with the 100's of millions of dollars they have in hand, Gecko, the rendering engine of the browser is still not a truly modular piece of code that can be easily used in other projects. And that's by design (this is why most of the browsers that use the Firefox-Gecko codebase are just Firefox clones with superficial changes to the UI and config). If I remember right, Nokia spent considerable effort to try and reuse Gecko (make it modular?) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180830103541/http://blog.idemp... - and Sailfish OS now uses that fork in its mobile browser. (It was only when Mozilla feared that they were losing the mobile browser war that they decided to offer Gecko as a hacky modular codebase for only the Android platform, to be used as webviews or create other browsers. Similar options for Desktop platforms still don't exist).
Isn't all that a valid criticism, whether you are a capitalist or an opensource developer?
e2le15 hours ago
Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.
Dwedit11 hours ago
I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.
We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.
fooofw11 hours ago
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."
Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.
johnnyanmac9 hours ago
before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.
mhitza15 hours ago
I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.
The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening
wkat424210 hours ago
Yes but local translation already is in Firefox and it's already made with some kind of AI model. Nobody complained about that.
AuthAuth11 hours ago
What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.
Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful
marcosdumay12 hours ago
What are all the recent AI features? Because I ever only noticed the local translation, and can't find anything else by looking at the menu.
EDIT: Oh, I've found a context menu item-list.
AuthAuth15 hours ago
I'm glad to see some mozilla employees standing their base in the comments. That guy trying to make the point that Mozilla was wasting resources chasing trend only for an employee to say it was a few people checking it out while 1000 people continued work on the normal stuff is nice to see.
The non mozilla people in that thread are so petty. Maybe it'd be better to have them go use another browser and stop dragging down firefox's reputation.
runtimepanic15 hours ago
This feels less like an “anti-AI” stance and more like a trust and control issue. For browsers especially, users have very different threat models and performance expectations, and “always on” AI features blur that line quickly. An explicit opt-out makes sense, but I wonder if the more important question is whether these features can be implemented in a way that’s truly local and auditable. If users can’t clearly understand where data goes and what runs on-device, toggles become a necessary safety valve rather than a preference.
ronsor15 hours ago
I haven't paid close attention, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla has mostly invested in local AI for tasks such as translation, summarization, and organization. As long as that's the case, I don't see any particular safety or privacy risks; if it works without an Internet connection, it's probably OK.
forgotpwd1615 hours ago
Summarization is using a chosen cloud-based AI provider.
freehorse14 hours ago
Are you sure? I see a huge spike in CPU when I long-click on a link to see the preview and summary. This is the newest summarization feature, not the older one with the chatbot on the side.
forgotpwd1614 hours ago
Ah, didn't know they moved to local models. My comment was about the old chatbot-based feature.
butz15 hours ago
Firefox should release a separate build - "base", "core", "classic" - clearly, I am not a marketing person, but idea behind it, that this is only a browser without any extra features added. No "AI", no studies, no account sync. Only bare minimum browser, that allows user to do their internet things and, if they ever desire, will install all extra bells and whistles as extensions. No need to agree to any EULA either (remember, that it was added to Firefox?). And, the best part, all existing users will still keep using the same old Firefox version, no surprises for them. Now, I assume that someone will tell me, that this version already exists and is called ESR :)
bondarchuk14 hours ago
For example at the moment multi-account containers is a plugin. I needed it and installed the plugin and it's fine.
netule13 hours ago
It kind of sucks that this isn’t a core feature of the browser, but the AI stuff will be. At least Firefox sync is good enough to sync extensions.
driverdan14 hours ago
Firefox should be a browser, period. It should render pages. All other features should be extensions.
GaryBluto10 hours ago
That would've been possible if they didn't kill XUL.
asadotzler7 hours ago
That's silly. It's still entirely possible as there are plenty of great extensions that don't require XUL and Firefox, which is still almost entirely XUL, can be hacked on locally to reduce surfaced features all the way down to a window with an addressbar and nothing else by examining that XUL and using userChrome.css to alter it.
yjftsjthsd-h14 hours ago
I'm pretty sure ESR is a different thing, but yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think it even should be relatively easy, insofar as that a lot of the non-base functionality is in built-in extensions?
99990000099912 hours ago
Have it as a stand alone plugin.
I should have to manually install this AI stuff.
Tempest198112 hours ago
Forcing everything into a plug-in is architecturally more complex, and less performant... I'm imagining proxying from native code through JavaScript APIs, then back to native code for LLM operations and context storage. But might lead to creation of some new AI extension APIs.
99990000099911 hours ago
Then ship a FireFoxAI browser for users who want it.
Forcing everyone to by default use AI isn't freedom. I might as well just use Chrome.
prmoustache2 hours ago
Is it using AI if you don't click on the feature's related button? AFAIK when I choose to translate a page or a selection it only starts working when I do it.
Tempest198111 hours ago
So now we're debating compile-time feature flags vs run-time, and the overhead of running/maintaining multiple build configs. And picking good names for each... "Firefox Pro with AI" vs "Firefox Lite for Engineers". This isn't what Mozilla needs to be focusing on right now, imo.
9999000009997 hours ago
With over 600 million in revenue they can afford to put up a different page for Firefox AI.
A large percentage of users, particularly Firefox users , don't want this AI stuff built in.
Where does this AI even run. Does it have to make an API requests to send all of the webpages I view somewhere else ?
Is it even my computer anymore, my browser, or am I sharing it with people who want to extract more money from me.
As is Google forced me to view often incorrect AI summaries when I have no interest in them.
Do I want the only real Chrome competitor to also force bad ai content in my face ?
dietr1ch12 hours ago
The team (AND Marketing) should focus on saying it's a fast core browser with the extensions you want to make it yours.
Have recommended extension sets ([uBlock, Sponsorblock], [Containerise, Sideberry, Decentraleyes], [AI translation + Dictionary/Thesaurus]).
Make me want to use your AI features, don't just slap them on my face wishing I'll do more than get mad and try to get rid of them.
RunSet12 hours ago
Language models are not like the Classic Theme, which can be relegated to an extension (now defunct).
Language models are like Hello, Pocket, and Sync. Core browser features one and all that must silently run by default unless explicitly disabled.
sfRattan9 hours ago
Sync is the only feature you listed which is arguably a core feature, in that it makes sense to build into the browser to be able to sync as much of the browser's settings and data as possible for the user. Everything else --- Hello, Pocket, and LLMs --- can and should sink or swim as extensions which the user must seek out and install if they provide sufficient value.
tjpnz7 hours ago
You won't find much relating to Pocket or Hello in the OSS project. I predict a lot of the new AI functionality will stay out too. So not core functionality.
worldsavior12 hours ago
You're not a normal user of Firefox then.
ivan_gammel12 hours ago
Normal users will be fine if they will see two big squares side by side as an installation step: „with AI“ and „without AI“, where the former will just install and enable the plugin. Explicit choice is better than opt-out, and it’s not going to be something people frequently change their mind about, so another switch can be buried in settings.
azemetre12 hours ago
Firefox has <5% of browser share, no one is a normal user of firefox.
araes9 hours ago
Was actually looking for somebody mentioning this bit. Admittedly, one of the few regular Firefox users. Yet, as a regular Firefox user, this much ranting about something that can be turned off with a click, is kind of annoying. The stuff that's been added so far ("Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points", "Solo AI Website Creator", "Sidebar AI chatbot") is incredibly easy to disable. Been in advanced, beta, dev releases for a while.
Edge has a larger market share (4%-7% depending on who you ask)
Firefox has (2%-6%, similar issue). Firefox mostly scores well among Wikimedia users and tracking. (High as 15% recently) Firefox barely even registers with Mobile users (0.5%-1.5%).
And. They both pale in comparison to Chrome (56%-69%) and Safari (14%-24%) in terms of user base / market share. People can argue and rant about Firefox doing something, yet they're arguing about 2%-6% of the WWW users currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...
werdnapk9 hours ago
I've been a normal user of Firefox for over 20 years.
99990000099912 hours ago
Who is a "normal" user.
Normal users install Chrome.
bayindirh12 hours ago
We want "normal" users to use Firefox, not to push it to a smaller niche with more force. Even though I don't like or use this "AI thingy", it should be equally easy to use and equally easy to disable.
If Firefox can provide a more anonymized gate to these providers and guarantee that prompts are not used for training, this would be a net win for people who want to use AI but doesn't know better, i.e. the "normal" users.
reyqn12 hours ago
That's how normal users stay on chrome while your users leave firefox. That's how you get no users at all.
andrepd12 hours ago
Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.
kotaKat12 hours ago
This. My browser should be a browser and nothing more. If I want more, I should be able to use an add-on. Stop baking everything in out of the box.
unethical_ban5 hours ago
I should have to manually install this bookmarks stuff.
I should have to manually install this search bar stuff.
I should have to manually install this FTP client stuff (okay that last one is the case)
jamesgill15 hours ago
Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
HelloUsername14 hours ago
> Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?
"All AI features will also be opt-in"
jamesgill13 hours ago
He said there would be both an "AI kill switch" but that it's also "opt-in". Taken together, his two statements seem a little...odd.
neobrain35 minutes ago
People are already getting worked up about being prompted to opt into a new feature on update (even if that prompt is hidden behind an icon that doesn't do anything until the user clicks it), so it's not inconceivable that the kill switch just disables those opt-in prompts for AI-related features.
prmoustache2 hours ago
I guess that just means that there will be a number of AI related features you can choose to select but if at some point you want it all gone you just hit the checkmark Disable all AI.
lawtalkinghuman14 hours ago
They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org
That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.
rk062 hours ago
to pump adoption number. it is well known that adoption rate is much higher when people are forced to opt-in be default.
because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine
lawtalkinghuman17 minutes ago
Mozilla shouldn't need to worry about adoption numbers though.
netsharc14 hours ago
I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.
I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".
(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.
eps14 hours ago
Don't need to run studies to understand that.
If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.
bigstrat200314 hours ago
> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them
Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.
dzikimarian13 hours ago
Because if this browser will have zero appeal to wider public it will die and you will have to pick between Chrome forks.
johnnyanmac8 hours ago
Yes, that’s the intent of the argument. If it’s so valuable , people will find it, talk about it, amd it’ll spread on its merits.
RegnisGnaw15 hours ago
Because money! Seriously that's the answer to most of these questions.
al_borland15 hours ago
Is there a business model behind actually making profit off this stuff yet? Last I looked, Mozilla is still making almost all their money from Google.
nemomarx15 hours ago
The new CEO said he views it as a monetization source. I'm not really sure how, but he apparently has something in mind I can't think of.
reidrac15 hours ago
The chatbot can provide sponsored responses. Not sure how evident those will be, but I think it will happen. Surely is in Google's mind.
al_borland14 hours ago
If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.
I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.
johnnyanmac9 hours ago
Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.
OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.
chaosharmonic12 hours ago
Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?
(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)
al_borland12 hours ago
What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.
chaosharmonic12 hours ago
Huh. Somehow I'd thought those programs were platform level and not item level. Which, yeah, does explain the problem a lot more clearly.
prmoustache2 hours ago
There are other ways to monetize. For instance small local AI models by default with option to pay to use faster/more efficient AI models remotely.
mort9612 hours ago
I still don't want to use an "AI browser". I don't want to use a browser where all or most development effort goes into "AI features" that I need to disable. I want a browser where the development effort goes into making it better at browsing the web.
ekjhgkejhgk15 hours ago
Mullvad browser doesn't have an option to disable all AI features because it doesn't have any.
(The Mullvad guys took Tor browser for its resistance to fingerprinting and removed the connection the Tor network. You don't need Mullvad VPN to use the browser)
BeetleB13 hours ago
Could someone summarize the problem with Firefox's AI features?
At least when I last checked (months ago), none of those features that involve communicating with external servers would work unless you configure them to (i.e. provide credentials to an LLM provider).
Was I wrong? Have things changed?
baobun9 hours ago
What was your methodology in checking? I got different results using a local mitmproxy on a clean install.
BeetleB9 hours ago
Thanks for the link - I see it's not that much more than Waterfox.
Getting to the discussion at hand, which of those pings are AI related? I didn't say FF isn't making network calls.
ksherlock12 hours ago
I don't use firefox so I can't confirm, but one issue might be 15+ (?!) different config settings needed to disable AI and it still won't go away.
BeetleB12 hours ago
That's a UX issue, but I keep hearing complaints about privacy.
phyzome9 hours ago
Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
BeetleB9 hours ago
> Anything that makes it easy to accidentally send local data elsewhere is a privacy issue.
How is it "easy" if nothing is sent unless you configure the AI?
What I'm asking is: If I do a brand new profile, default configuration, how can any AI related feature send anything that is of privacy concern? If you don't set up an LLM provider, it has nowhere to send to.
I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking in the thread. So far, no one has shown what the problem is.
phyzome7 hours ago
I have no idea whether any of the AI features require explicit setup vs. automatically use a paid-for API somewhere.
But it also doesn't matter, because that's the kind of distinction that I've seen go back and forth elsewhere.
BeetleB5 hours ago
OK, to be frank, it seems like people are needlessly crazy paranoid.
I agree with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316763
278 comments, many very angry, and no one can clearly articulate how privacy is being compromised because of the AI features.
On a project whose source is available.
Insane.
t1234s15 hours ago
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Saris15 hours ago
Zen, Waterfox, Librewolf, Floorp.. For android there's Fennec, Iceraven.
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
baobun11 hours ago
Zen and Floorp are not obvious improvements from a privacy and control perspective.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Saris11 hours ago
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
baobun10 hours ago
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
rjdj377dhabsn7 hours ago
For Android, Ironfox is currently the best option IMO.
thisislife23 hours ago
Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser and PaleMoon browser (a modern browser, though it doesn't support webextensions).
Loudergood14 hours ago
Pocket has been gone for awhile now. Is it really that hard to uncheck some boxes to turn this all off?
Quot15 hours ago
My preference is Zen (https://zen-browser.app/), but there's also LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) if you want a less customized fork.
moderation14 hours ago
I moved to Zen but have subsequently moved to Glide [0] which I find to have less UI fluff and the keyboard shortcuts and scriptability are excellent.
Timwi8 hours ago
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
bhhaskin15 hours ago
It should be a plugin. Anything that isn't directly related to the core mission of a web browser should be a plugin.
asadotzler7 hours ago
Browsers don't do plugins any more. Firefox hasn't had NPAPI for almost a decade.
BeaverGoose8 hours ago
I would pay $100 a year for a Firefox that just focused on privacy and was competitive speed and features (at rendering) with chrome.
[deleted]11 hours agocollapsed
alexgotoi12 hours ago
This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern. If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
1vuio0pswjnm710 hours ago
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults
Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it
For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
LexiMax8 hours ago
Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable.
Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.
nicoburns7 hours ago
Apple's Preview is my favourite. It uses AI to allow you to copy text from images. And that's it.
FridgeSeal6 hours ago
This is my go to example of “ai features that are actually useful to me”. Ubiquitous OCR, and ubiquitous semantic search in photos.
Not a chat bot. Not an “ask ai” button, just those things.
MarsIronPI6 hours ago
That's not "AI" in the sense of LLMs, which is what the recent trend in AI complaints is about.
dspillett7 hours ago
> Kagi
I've been toying with that for ages on and off. Finally now a paid up user due to the fact that their guesswork engine (or makey-upy machine, or your preferred name) can be easily turned off, and stays off until requested otherwise.
BloondAndDoom11 hours ago
My problem here is this; products are designed with a vision. If you are designing with 2-3 visions it won’t be that good, if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought. This tells me non-AI version of it will suffer (IMHO)
nateb20229 hours ago
> if you design with one vision (AI) then non-AI version of the product will be an after thought
That’s like saying if a car manufacturer adds a "Sport Mode", the steering wheel and brakes suddenly become an afterthought.
Being AI-available means we'll welcome more Firefox users who would otherwise choose a different browser. Being AI-optional means we won't alienate the anti-AI crowd. Why not embrace both?
wkat424210 hours ago
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
RunSet12 hours ago
> This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust.
Though not so much trust as an option to enable AI features would build.
troupo11 hours ago
The trust is built by not enabling this by default, and by not burying the "kill switch" somewhere in settings that non-power users will never find.
bayindirh10 hours ago
Currently disable switch is right next to AI chat bot settings. It’s pretty on your face.
ragequittah5 hours ago
I've been really confused as to what all the hubub is about. I think I saw the sidebar for about 4 seconds on each of my installs before I hid it forever. I tried to reenable it to see what people were complaining about but couldn't find it within 10 seconds so gave up.
bayindirh2 hours ago
AFAIK, you can't enable them without resetting things in about:config. So it's a "big red button", and that's a good thing.
johnnyanmac10 hours ago
Worse yet, burying in settings where they give a big disclaimer that they can (and often are) reset when the browser updates.
bstsb12 hours ago
saying "trying to slow down, I promise" doesn't magically make your blatant advert not spam
edit: the original post ended with words to the tune of "Totally unrelated, but I run [insert newsletter here]... "
alexgotoi12 hours ago
Edited and removed.
all210 hours ago
Why? Why kowtow to people who don't care about your wellbeing or long term success?
taurath11 hours ago
> It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern.
They literally shipped an AI sidebar nobody asked for.
teaearlgraycold7 hours ago
I find it a nice feature.
est4 hours ago
I am out of the loop, but what AI features does Firefox offer these days?
VortexLain11 hours ago
This would be useful for many people who want to avoid AI features being forced on them by every piece of software imaginable. Hopefully, a centralized kill switch like this will also make it easy for Firefox forks such as Zen and Floorp to let users enable AI features if they want to without changing about:flags.
zelphirkalt8 hours ago
How about we don't enable AI features by default in the first place?
nektro2 hours ago
after the disaster of comms from the new ceo, this is really great to see.
oybng11 hours ago
Firefox had options for many things, until those options were removed
wkat424210 hours ago
I don't really care so much about that. I worry more about the CEO speaking about blocking adblockers like it's a normal business decision. Wtf
johnnyanmac8 hours ago
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
evo_915 hours ago
I hope Zen disables this by default, or completely removes it if that’s an option.
VortexLain10 hours ago
Such features should be disabled by default, but as a user of Zen, I really hope it'd be possible to enable AI features.
kevin06115 hours ago
Yeah the option is called Waterfox, Palemoon, or even Vivaldi.
reidrac15 hours ago
Vivaldi is not open source. Not quite an option.
kevin06115 hours ago
dntbrsnbl14 hours ago
I think the UI code is not open source (so you can't build the browser yourself).
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...
butz14 hours ago
Wait, what? Vivaldi is open source? Now I am confused and really not sure what was the reason I ignored it for so long. Was there something iffy with Linux desktop integration?
presbyterian12 hours ago
It is not open source. Some of the backend is.
forgotpwd1615 hours ago
Quite surprised at Vivaldi. Considered that as Opera spiritual successor including any possible feature, will've been one of the first browsers adding AI.
mwkaufma10 hours ago
Where's the kill switch to remove AI from development?
jonathanstrange15 hours ago
I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
asadotzler7 hours ago
Local translation of websites so you don't have to tell Google about all the sites you want to read that are not in your language. Firefox's address bar that learns what you type most often and moves those items higher in the autocomplete list. There are plenty of great cases for AI very tightly integrated in the browser. That you haven't thought very hard about it or even bothered to see what AI Firefox has already had for ages (Awesomebar was about 15 years ago) is precisely why you don't "get it."
freehorse14 hours ago
Local translations?
koolala14 hours ago
Is it just as easy to make an extension that runs a local AI translation model? Translation would benefit from having a community continuously updating and tuning local models for languages.
If it was an extension it would be nice if people could fork it with other models. Just like their AI Tab Grouping feature would be much better forked with a deterministic non-AI grouping system.
johnnyanmac8 hours ago
I had a translation extension for a good 2 years before it was built into FF
asadotzler7 hours ago
You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.
johnnyanmac6 hours ago
I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).
>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.
The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.
I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.
On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.
ooterness14 hours ago
Sounds like a great plugin.
geekamongus7 hours ago
Oh, this is great news!
Madmallard5 hours ago
Doesn't matter?
https://youtube.com/shorts/FObvkFtr2ZU?si=U6fCphjmGcNMb5ac
Until they change this back they are not trustworthy at all.
leothetechguy11 hours ago
Honestly this should've been introduced with the new AI Features from the start, it's just shipping slightly too late to fully regain my trust.
micromacrofoot11 hours ago
I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries.
If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
johnnyanmac6 hours ago
>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.
Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.
That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.
squigz13 hours ago
I'll never understand why people feel so strongly about features like this and that they have to be opt-in.
I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in? What about the other 85% of the browser's features I don't use?
baobun11 hours ago
The bookmarks feature doesn't silently connect to their servers in the background to function.
The supposed local-only features like translations will download at least model updates and configuration, which leaks metadata.
johnnyanmac8 hours ago
> I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in?
You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.
But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
kgwxd10 hours ago
i don't even want the code present on my machine, only being held back by a checkbox that may or may not be correctly respected. this is what extensions we invented for.
4k93n27 hours ago
its funny how multi-account containers is a such a killer feature of firefox (that none of the other browsers are able to implement, as far as i remember) but its kept as an extension and they never seem too bothered about promoting it either
BoredPositron15 hours ago
The problem with the "Trust me bro." stuff is that it only works if you are trusted and after the last decade Mozilla is anything but.
joduplessis15 hours ago
> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
dang13 hours ago
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
azemetre11 hours ago
I thought this rule only applied to users commenting with each other, didn't know it applied to posted content too.
yoavm15 hours ago
I love threads about Mozilla. New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers. Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
wtallis15 hours ago
Mozilla has a recurring problem with being unable to provide the simple, obvious right answer.
When they re-wrote Firefox for Android, they were unable to give the simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
Earlier this year Mozilla couldn't provide the simple, obvious response of "we will never sell your personal information". Instead, they tried to make excuses about not agreeing with California's definition of "selling personal information".
A few days ago, we find out that their new CEO can't clearly and emphatically say "we would never take money to break ad blockers, because that goes against everything we stand for".
Now, they seemingly can't even realize that having a "kill switch" calls into doubt whether they actually know what "opt-in" means.
Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
umanwizard14 hours ago
> simple, obvious answer to the effect of "yes, we understand extensions are a core feature of our browser and we plan to fully support extensions on Fenix and won't consider it done until we do". Instead, they talked about whitelisting a handful of extensions, and took three years from shipping Fenix as stable before they had a broad open extension ecosystem up and running again.
That answer is not as obvious to me as you claim it is. I don't use any browser extensions except 1password, which I would have no reason to use on a phone (at least assuming Android has builtin password manager functionality like iOS does).
I think you overestimate what fraction of people care about extensions.
smlavine14 hours ago
I use Firefox on Android perhaps entirely because it supports uBlock Origin and my other extensions.
I would guess that of people that would ever go out of their way to use a non-Chrome browser on Android, the fraction who care about extensions is pretty significant.
seltzered_13 hours ago
On a different tack, I feel like I went out of my way to use Firefox (and Firefox Focus) on iOS and was thankful they had them during a time where everything had to use the safari renderer. IIRC Firefox Focus even had an ad-block extension that worked on safari
thisislife23 hours ago
Firefox / Focus (like all browsers on ios) actually uses the "Safari renderer" (WebKit) because Apple doesn't allow any other browser engine on ios.
umanwizard14 hours ago
I would agree that it's probably significant. But it's probably not so high that a non-extensions-enabled Firefox for Android wouldn't be useful.
JoeBOFH14 hours ago
I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.
homebrewer14 hours ago
According to Mozilla's own stats, most Firefox users do not have any extensions at all:
> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.
> December 8, 2025
> 45.4%
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior
Note that language packs are counted as extensions.
Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.
(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
wkat42426 hours ago
I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
glenstein13 hours ago
Always appreciate people citing real data! I honestly would not have been able to guess one way or the other but unfortunately most comments are kind of hip firing in random directions that are impossible to keep track of, so it helps to keep these discussions grounded.
Aardwolf13 hours ago
But what if you weigh this by usage time? The firefoxes without extensions might be hardly ever used
johnnyanmac7 hours ago
I you can’t take the time to install a new tool. You don’t need it. And I think that’s a great mindset to have with not just software, but when approaching life.
I keep lean and only look for an extension or install amd app when it’s clear what problem I have and want to solve.
wtallis14 hours ago
Why do you use 1password on non-phone devices?
ToucanLoucan13 hours ago
> Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
johnnyanmac7 hours ago
I can put up with a lot of friction and cruft as long as the foundations are solid amd I feel a product is moving in the right direction. I moved off chrome when it became crystal clear that Chrome was not even pretending to compete on User experience anymore, even in it is still the best browser in some regards.
I hate that I feel to be having déjà vu here. My needs are simple and I’m surrounded by software wanting to inflate itself more and more. And being hostile about it, to boot.
yjftsjthsd-h15 hours ago
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers.
New CEO says they've run the numbers and decided to not kill adblockers, leading to people asking why exactly they were running those numbers (if it was an actual ideological commitment, the numbers wouldn't matter).
> Mozilla says they'll add a killswitch for all AI features (so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy), and people blame them for not having it as an enable-switch.
Yes, opt-in vs opt-out is kinda an important distinction. And you're assuming that opposition is a "tiny but vocal", which - especially among people bothering to use firefox - seems unfounded. Which brings use neatly to,
> Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control... then you have a userbase of power users and folks who care about privacy and control. If Mozilla said up front that they were only interested in money and don't care about users, then fair enough, but don't go trumpeting how you fight for the user and then act surprised when the user holds you to that.
glenstein14 hours ago
The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
Communicating about what you're knowingly rejecting is a point of pride, not a confession. But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
ahartmetz13 hours ago
There is a difference between "FYI, we're rejecting a ton of money for us, that's how serious we are about not selling out" and "We ran the numbers, and on balance, taking these 30% more money doesn't seem like the right thing to do because it would be against our stated mission statement".
The second one doesn't sound like real conviction.
glenstein13 hours ago
Thank you for directly addressing my point! I disagree but I respect your prioritization of of substance. I agree that notionally there's a difference but (1) they never said they "ran the numbers", (2) there are other good reasons for having access to that data that don't involve selling out, and (3) this all hinges on squinting and interpreting and projecting, and splitting the difference on linguistic interpretation is about as weak as circumstantial evidence can possibly get.
Real argument: "they said they're doing "privacy preserving" ads, look at this post where they announce it". Real argument "they say they're putting AI in the browser, I don't like that. Here's the statement!" Real argument: " they purchased Anonym and are dabbling in adtech, here's the news article announcing the acquisition!"
Not real argument: "They said they didn't want to take money to kill ad blockers but if you squint maybe it kinda implies they considered it, at least if you don't consider other reasons they might be aware of that figure." At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
The thing that's unfortunate here is I would like to think this goes without saying, but ordinary standards of charitable interpretation are so far in the rear view mirror that I don't know that people comfortable making these accusations would even recognize charitable interpretation as a shared value. Not in the sense of bending over backwards to apologize or make excuses, but in the ordinary Daniel Dennett sense of a built-in best practice to minimize one's own biases.
wkat42427 hours ago
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
yjftsjthsd-h9 hours ago
> The creator of VLC has publicly noted dollar amounts they could raise if they either sold or compromised VLC, but it came and went without controversy. OBS Studio, 7-Zip, Notepad++, and Nextcloud have all published offers they've received and declined, or quoted per-install payment figures. In fact, it's practically a rite of passage for open source projects to talk about the value of their work in terms of what they could monetize but choose not to.
In all of those examples, the devs note that people have reached out to them, unprompted, to try and get them to sell out. That's materially different from a company proactively looking into the payoffs of selling out. The only question is whether the latter is what's happening; I'm having trouble tracking down the actual thing that was said (I think in an interview?).
[deleted]9 hours agocollapsed
wtallis14 hours ago
Please stop calling people deranged for expecting Mozilla to do the right thing without dissembling. Having your previous such comment flagged and killed should have been sufficient reminder to you that you're behaving inappropriately for this forum.
glenstein13 hours ago
Take a look at Graham's hiearchy and see if you can move up the ladder from tone policing. Were any of my examples: VLC, 7-Zip, Nextcloud incorrect? Let me know and I'll thank you your good faith effort to be responsive to substance.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy...
yjftsjthsd-h9 hours ago
Alright, I looked at the hierarchy; I believe that
> But since there's no such thing as an OBS, or Nextcloud, or VLC Derangement syndrome, nobody grabs the pitchforks in those cases.
qualifies as name-calling.
someNameIG13 hours ago
> Well, yes. If you build a userbase out of power users and folks who care about privacy and control...
Is that their core user base, or just the vocal user base online? Only 5-10% of their user base have UBO installed (FF has almost 200 million users, extension store reports ~10 million UBO installs).
Firefox isn't LibreWolf, it's user base are just average people, not much different than that of Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
yjftsjthsd-h7 hours ago
I don't know how to rigorously verify who their actual users are on the ground, but it seems like that's at least nominally their target; https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ says,
> Firefox: Get the gold standard for browsing with speed, privacy and control.
I hadn't actually seen that when I wrote "power users and folks who care about privacy and control", but that's even mostly the same words, let alone intent.
eps14 hours ago
Amen.
Barrin9213 hours ago
>If you build a userbase out of power users
But they've never done this. There is a very vocal group of Firefox power users but the browser has always targeted a general audience, marginalization by Chrome over the years not withstanding.
If you have any ambition to regain some of that market share listening to the average vocal Hackernews or Reddit commenter, who is not the median user, even just among the current ~150 million users is not a good idea.
ivanmontillam14 hours ago
I am fine with it being a disable-button, as long it's persistent once set.
What I honestly fear is that while AI-features are disabled, popups inviting me to enable them again. That, or them auto-enabling them on every update like sometimes has happened with `browser.ml.enable` flag on `about:config`.
Krssst13 hours ago
They don't do that for any feature, no reason they'd do it for AI.
wkat424210 hours ago
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
nhinck34 hours ago
Have they come out and said what personal data they are selling yet? They were awfully guarded about what they were selling and to who.
I guess we shouldn't worry though, just some random law thought that what they were doing was "selling personal data" but we shouldn't think that it was. No further explanation required.
som13 hours ago
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.
But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
WhyOhWhyQ14 hours ago
Sounds like robust criticism is having an effect. Why would you not be happy with the situation?
yoavm14 hours ago
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
johnnyanmac8 hours ago
Trust takes a lifetime to build, and a moment to break. Those “moments” are becoming more of streams of time these days.
How many times does a scorpion need to sting the frog for the frog to be justified in being wary of “ I definitely won’t sting you this time!”
jm412 hours ago
The anti-AI people think they are in the majority. They could be, but I suspect that's not the case. I would be surprised if many in the anti-AI crowd could even point to the specific features of the devices and software they use daily that fall under the "AI" umbrella. Meanwhile, regular people are increasingly turning to chatbots instead of search engines. It seems clear we are at peak hype, but this stuff is here to stay.
jamesgill13 hours ago
He didn't say he wasn't going to remove ad blockers; he said "I don't want to". No commitment or position, just a preference.
gldrk15 hours ago
It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.
ekr____14 hours ago
> Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu.
This is not true, and is easily verifiable for yourself.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
The vast majority of Firefox usage is on Windows.
gldrk13 hours ago
I am surprised. Does that imply most GNU/Linux users go out of their way to install Chromium actually? Ubuntu and Firefox have a similar market share.
homebrewer13 hours ago
No idea about most Linux users, but here's what little we know for sure:
Arch pkgstats (opt-in): ~64% FF, ~41% Chromium, ~17% Chrome
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Browsers/current
Debian popcon (opt-in): 2.2% Firefox, ~10.3% Chromium
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firefox
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=chromium
Flathub installs: 10kk Firefox, 10kk Chrome, 1.8kk Chromium
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.google.Chrome
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium
snapcraft statistics isn't public, afaik.
yoavm15 hours ago
I agree, but there's nothing more frustrating than another niche user group imagining that the reason for this failure is Mozilla lacking to address their obscure requests, while Mozilla's real goal is to create a browser for everyone. The truth is that this goal is borderline impossible, and all these double standards (can't count the times I've heard "I'm tired of Firefox, moving to Chrome!") surely aren't helping.
nkrisc13 hours ago
The fact they need to add an “AI kill switch” is the problem.
bpt315 hours ago
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.
That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.
Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
lenerdenator12 hours ago
When you have a position in the project called "CEO" and that person has the ability to hand down edicts of what he or she sees the project as being, that's when you get into trouble, especially in free software. We've seen this way of developing software co-opted by major companies who have turned otherwise good projects - Chromium and AOSP immediately come to mind - into vendor lock-in and spyware by some suit who has been told he needs to create value.
The thing they can do to win is to start acting like they maintain a free/libre open-source software project. It should be completely fine for Mozilla to make a grand total of $0.00 off of Firefox.
Think of Linux (specifically the kernel) or Python. Sure there's a person whose opinion holds more weight than everyone else's (at least for the kernel), but they typically focus on delivering general guidance to a group of people who are free to create features on their own and present those to leadership. If it's quality and fits what the general purpose of the project is, it gets merged into the trunk, and released with everything else.
That needs to be how Mozilla handles Firefox at this point. If some working group of contributors wants to start an implementation of GenAI in Firefox, let them do so and let the community hash it out. If the community doesn't feel the need to create it, well, then Firefox won't have it... and that's fine.
So many of these free software projects try to do too much and change what the core output of the project is in the process, and they lose sight of what the project is.
ramesh3114 hours ago
>Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
superkuh15 hours ago
This seems like a cultural mismatch more than anything. Mozilla makes software that human people use and human people use normal language rather than avoiding the non-profitable aggravation associated with emotive language that a company employee might be used to.
Look at the point that op made instead of the tone: the AI feature should be opt-in not opt-out.
That's a good point. Let's talk about that. It seems like it's a simple thing to do to show good faith that this won't be a normal corporate AI push.
ep10315 hours ago
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome
dsr_15 hours ago
... because Mozilla doesn't pay any attention to them?
reidrac15 hours ago
so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy
[citation needed]
yoavm15 hours ago
Citation for what really? That the anti-AI movement is a minority? Just ask around you "have you used AI today?" and I'm pretty sure you'll see what I mean. I don't have a horse in this game and I'm not an AI fan, but the numbers speak for themselves so much that the mere question is odd.
gldrk14 hours ago
The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.
yoavm14 hours ago
True, and a reasonable PM will ignore both the anti-AI and the AI-in-everything groups.
johnnyanmac6 hours ago
We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.
And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.
lawtalkinghuman14 hours ago
> the numbers speak for themselves
What numbers? Have Mozilla published any numbers showing their AI experiments have been warmly received by users?
dismalaf15 hours ago
Because they're already reneged on past promises. Trust is gone.
marricks14 hours ago
Literally every other browser and most tech companies are shoving AI down users throats. Firefox isn't missing the boat by neglecting AI, they're missing it by being an alternative which reminds us how nice things can be without it.
The past 15 years has been a slow decline while they were trying to prove some relevancy outside of their core product. With mobile browsers being locked down a decline was going to happen anyways but if they stuck to their guns at least they wouldn't have wasted a bunch of money and maintained more of their base.
Who knows, their position sucks, but they're not going to win anyone by being the worst AI focused browser which happens to have an off switch.
mindcrash14 hours ago
The solution for the (as of yet) small group of people who cares about these things is very simple: community driven forks.
With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.
These include:
Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/
Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/
Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/
Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
nemomarx13 hours ago
Unfortunately the more interesting ones use Chromium. I wish Zen was better developed and less "aesthetic", it might be worth a shot.
dblohm714 hours ago
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.
Like the one described in the subsequent toot?
> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...
catapart14 hours ago
I was about to use a quote to show you that "no, it's not like what is described in the thread", but you included the salient bit in the second quote, yourself.
It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around. If the browser has the capability, I don't want it. I want to be able to add it with a plugin, and that's it. Plugins should have full control to whatever is necessary (same as adblock stuff; plenty of security but enough "user beware" to allow truly useful utilities). And AI features should all be plugins. Separate ones, if I had my way, but bundles if that makes more sense. I do not and will not need AI to browse. It's an enhancement. The core product (or at least ONE OF the products offered) should allow me to do without the enhancement. And opt in if I want to. There's nothing gray there, and I'm so fucking sick of mozilla trying to pull this "we disagree with common terminology" horseshit.
fsflover14 hours ago
> It's not a gray area, and "opt-in" isn't something to be weasled-worded around
How about "Translate" button?
catapart13 hours ago
What about it? If it's output is generated by the manipulation of tensors and weights, it doesn't belong in my browser. It's not there to because I need to browse, it's there because I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me. I could feed those network responses right into a separate, non-browser app and have it translate stuff for me, if I wanted. Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
And, if I'm being honest, "translation" is the only feature I would even consider splitting the builds for. At least in that feature I can see why a "default" version of the browser might benefit more people than not by including it. But that doesn't mean that a "clean" version shouldn't be provided. Build the core app, and then include as many plugins as you think "average users" will benefit from in the "default" version. I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
ekr____12 hours ago
> Why should I be required to download and ignore your translation feature, when I could just as easily not have it included in the first place?
This seems like special pleading. The browser (and any software package) is full of features that some people use and others don't. Just off the top of my head, these include: the password manager, PDF viewer, dev tools, and the extensions store. Each new SKU that the vendor has to provide is additional effort to build and test, and the result is that it's more expensive to produce the product. Moreover, it makes it harder for users to discover new features what they might want (oh, you wanted view source, you needed Firefox developer edition).
On the specific case of translation, I don't really see much of a distinction between "I need to browse" and "I want to read content that is not in a language that the content provider has supported for me". In both cases, I want to get the content on the site and I'd like the browser to help me do it.
> I don't mind being the minority, I just don't think it's inappropriate to ask for only what I need instead of "all the bullshit you want to force me to have".
And you can have that by building it yourself. It's open source software. What you're really asking for is for Mozilla to build a version of the software that has only the features you personally want.
catapart12 hours ago
lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses. It really is that easy.
But, sure, I need to go build it myself because I had the gall to ask "can't I just have the parts I need?"
ekr____11 hours ago
> lol. I didn't ask for SKUs, I asked for plugins. I wouldn't mind the dev tools, and PDF viewer being plugins too. Again, include those plugins in the default download, just let me have a download that doesn't include them. Modularity to the bone, packaging for the masses.
This is in fact you asking for two SKUs, one with all the plugins (what you call the "default download") and one without ("let me have a download that doesn't include them.")
As for "really is that easy", as usual, it's easy in some cases and not others. To the extent to which things are already modular and developed separately, then yes, it probably is easy. To the extent that things are not currently modular, then it's separate engineering effort to make them so. In some cases that effort might be small (e.g., the new module is all in HTML/JS) and in some cases that effort might be large (e.g., there is extensive C/C++ code that needs to interface with the browser core). I don't know how much about Firefox's AI features to know which category they fall into. But it's almost certainly not zero effort in any case.
catapart11 hours ago
lol
whatever you say
tgsovlerkhgsel14 hours ago
No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it.
That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".
johnnyanmac6 hours ago
>and if you default to "no" without asking people even once
I'm still waiting for the polls and statistics and feature requests of this. The "without asking" is the primary problem.
1vuio0pswjnm713 hours ago
Make it a compile-time option
./configure --disable-ai[deleted]14 hours agocollapsed
binary13214 hours ago
correct opinion
CodeCompost2 hours ago
Can we please stop calling LLMs "AI"? It's obvious now that there is no intelligence here and no trying to make it talk to itself and call is "reasoning" is not the answer.
TonyStr39 minutes ago
Nope, it's too late. It sounded stupid when they called it AI in the start, but now AI means something like "tools that can perform tasks that typically requires human faculties to complete". Just like a computer does more than compute, words change meaning, sometimes influenced by marketing.
viktorcode15 hours ago
The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry
crossroadsguy14 hours ago
There are two things to note here:
1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,
2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.
A bonus third :D
3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!
Tepix11 hours ago
I don't understand why it's so difficult (impossible?) with Firefox to use your own private AI server (that's not running on localhost). With Brave it's pretty easy.
rolph10 hours ago
get your non AI versions here while they last:
Index of /pub/firefox/releases/
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
A LITTLE HELP:
How do I revert Firefox to a previous version and keep my profile intact?
https://superuser.com/questions/1643618/how-do-i-revert-fire...
gooob4 hours ago
what i hate most about this (and the discussion happening in the comments), is that nobody is even defining "AI". "artificial intelligence" is not a technical term. what is mozzila doing exactly? what does it mean to put AI in the browser?
hollerith3 hours ago
There is kind of software that is created using techniques very different from the techniques used to create the vast majority of socioeconomically-important software until about 4 years ago. We need a name for this thing that definitely exists in reality and definitely differs from software created the traditional way. That name is AI. We're probably going to keep on calling it that even if lots of people protest that having "intelligence" in the name is misleading or erroneous.