Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
mastodon.social586 points by twapi 4 months ago
586 points by twapi 4 months 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.
I am waiting for a serious fork of Mozilla to emerge at this point that pays the maintainers better in a bid to overtake Mozilla itself. People would donate to get a better browser, people dont donate because Mozilla wastes all their donor funds on nonsense.
I kind of gave up hope tbh. I still use Firefox but I am waiting for ladybug. It will probably take a couple of years to get there, but it’s what I would have wanted Firefox to be.
There are those. I pay to support Floorp.
But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.
I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously.
Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
After using projects named like "slurp", "eww" (combined with "yuck"), "yay", "honkers railway", "jason" and many many others, I personally kind of gave up on any attempts to judge projects by their titles. Partly due to many developers being whimsical nerds, partly because even marketable names say nothing about the product half the time so what's the point anyway
It’s Firefox fork being developed by a bunch of Japanese students.
They do good work. I can forgive them for not being the best at naming things in English.
I "forgive" them too, I have no animosity towards them and wish them the best. I just think that the name communicates a lack of seriousness. That's not a criticism, I have plenty of non-serious projects
Kind of agree, needs a better name. It sounds like the name of a social media platform.
Unless you purchased some service from them, you didn't donate to Firefox, because that's a Mozilla Corporation project. Donating to Mozilla Foundation funds their initiatives, but not Firefox.
To Thunderbird, however, we can actually donate to.
At one point, paying for Mozilla's mullvad rebadge would give money to the corp. If you were already going to pay for a VPN, then it's effectively a donation.
Though, just because money goes to the corp, doesn't mean it will contribute to Firefox' development either.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works.
And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic.
> Give us more extensibility instead.
True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL.
> Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more.
Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
> There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?
> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
Yes and that's a good thing
> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?
It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
> Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed.
Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.
AFAIR Mozilla is firmly against introducing new stuff that could be used for fingerprinting and that was their (and Apple's) rationale for not implementing it. That's a noble goal for sure, but peripheral access is a genuinely useful feature now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. You don't like JS having access to everything - fine, but than we need some other way to do this (without porting everything to native).
> now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform.
I feel like we can continue to resist this, although I admit it's getting more and more futile every year. It's like trying to hold back the tide. I personally don't want the web to be an application platform. The web is for browsing web pages. I have an application platform on my computer already.
I see your point. But there is an objective need for a some common ground to applications on. Something with zero install friction and proper sandbox isolation.
Because the alternative isn't "yes, we are providing Linux and MacOS-arm64 binaries", the alternative is "here is your Win32 blob that is broken on wine because screw you that's why" or "here is a .jar with a horrible awt fronts that is also broken unless you run it under an ancient JRT" - and that's on user's side, on developer's side it's even worse. I feel that web becoming an application platform was net negative for the web, but positive for every other platform (and users and developers as well). Yes, it makes web crappy, but we need some crappy platform where all the crap goes - and at least the browser contains the crap well.
> I feel like we can continue to resist this
Or we can accept it, make a good access control system in an app platform for once, and add the few missing parts that the web standards are still missing so it becomes a good platform.
And none of that requires that we give up on an entire facade focused on reading text.
But if Mozilla focus on resisting, they can't do that, and honestly, nobody else out there will.
It's stuff that obviously should not be in the web, that is Google EEEing the web...
Can't you install an extension that will connect to localhost where you can run anything?
> and not really that harmful in itself
Unless you can't afford the split focus. If Mozilla can do 1 thing right or 2 things half-assed, and it looks like this is the case, they should stop and focus on strengthening the core before hanging more stuff around it.
They have enough money to split their focus, sugar daddy Google is providing it.
I didn't mean it just in terms of money. We can see they don't have the ability to deliver on both fronts so maybe start with one, the more important core of the browser.
I dunno, clearly not.
I keep trying to use it. vs chrome:
1 - bad at returning memory to the OS; do they expect you to regularly restart the whole browser?
2 - shit at managing cpu usage: I'll regularly find the browser sitting at 20-100% cpu load doing nothing. Chrome handles this like a champ;
3 - it recently lost some bookmarks so hard I had to pull them from backup.
They clearly are not capable of splitting their focus.
> [Mozilla always jumped on fads], everyone does.
If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread, Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them, invested minimal resources in others (accepting donations in crypto), and modest resources in VR (which you'd expect given the browser-VR integration standards forming).
So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
> If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Yeah, I'm not searching 500 posts for this..
> Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread
Who is Christophe Henry? Is this some namecalling?
> Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them,
That doesn't make it better, being somewhat selective is also normal. Most companies don't have the resources to follow literally every fad.
> So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
That's the point. Communication of Mozilla is so awful, their whole public picture is how wasteful they are with money, throwing it at pointless dead on arrival-projects. Here are two lists with them [1], [2], this is not a small number of failed projects. They are not even including the small changes in the browser itself.
[1] https://www.spacebar.news/the-mozilla-graveyard/ [2] https://killedbymozilla.com/
The link goes to a conversation on Mastodon.social, and one of the first commenters is called Christophe Henry.
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.
Every browser developer should be forced to take an annual pilgrimage to this gravestone:
1. Take normal browser
2. Shoehorn flavor-of-the-week web-based over-hyped thing into browser "natively"
3. ???
4. Profit!
5 step plan for Mozilla to succeed against the Behemoth Googzilla and the leviathans of MAWS.
1. build a team in Europe to create an email service comparable to gmail/protonmail
- domains: mozmail.com, mmail.com, godmail.com, pmail.com, dogmail.com, meowmail.com
- promoted as a simple everyday email – no overly complicated/advanced federati features in order to increase inter-operability, reduce spam and dealing with federalism
- for more advanced features, integration links with something like signal, or a hosted comms platform
2. invest heavily in Firefox core development and service features
- push for system resource and performance optimizations, even if it requires extensive architectural changes
- focus on perfecting a core browser experience then developing an extension API that allows a level of UI customisations that XUL did, have unsafe/hackers warning for any extension that uses this API, even official ones
- invest in KeePassXC ux and integrate it as a first class and core feature in Firefox that is useable by hackers, consumers and enterprises – offer paid services for simple database sync/backup, as well as a decent managed solution for enterprise.
3. Expand further with a suite of other services that have both self-hosted and paid management extras
- calendar and email client, universally usable between providers, but first class with Firefox and mmail.
- integrate something like libreoffice into a desktop client that can also be embedded into a Firefox tab.
- straight forward self-hostable teams communication platform, managed cloud versions also availabe
- self-hosted / managed file storage platform with web UI with integration links to other services
- all of the above require a unified web, desktop and mobile ux
- offer further software and hardware integrations to completely streamline personal digital management
4. Extensive marketing and brand exposure over TV and social media, while staying charitably non-profit and recognizing the digital roots
- Use the firefox, gecko and other digital animals as icons
- Themes and scapes from origins such as mosaic/netscape
5. In this scene Mozilla continues knocking down the buildings of the titans.
It's funny how you post this comment under a comment that says no to all but 2.1 and 2.2.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core.
Steps 2 and 1 should probably be swapped, but I wouldn't say the rest of what I listed are fads, but what they'd need to become a real and complete alternative to the current ecosystems.
Just a silly idea anyway.
Ok so walk me through how _only_ focusing on the browser core will make them money other than continuing to be dependent on Google. How can they diversify their revenue streams?
I agree they should make the browser core good, but right now they are entirely dependent on their biggest competitor.
Falling behind on the browser core makes users leave Firefox because the one non-negotiable requirement users have is that the browser works on the websites they need it to work on. Literally nothing else Mozilla tries to do to diversify their revenue streams will matter if the browser they're trying to build it on top of is not sound and functional.
If they weren't slipping on the core browser as much as they have been, there wouldn't be nearly as many shouts as there are today when they instead spend resources on chasing the latest fad.
- Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox).
- Start crowdfunding for features.
- Go RedHat route, offer an enterprise version with centrally managed profiles and DLP feature. Not exactly free-as-in-freedom stuff but still better than adtech.
- Get some EU bureaucrats thru a FUD session against Chrome (does it counts as FUD if it's true?), then apply for some EU funding program. Dirty and messy, still better than adtech.
None of this is particularly lucrative or clean, but I don't see how AI would bring them any __revenue__ (do not confuse with investment) at all. There are too many players there already and many of them are more established - and what Mozilla have?
- Their engineering team? Maybe.
- The browser engine? Completely irrelevant (and that's exactly the problem).
- Their userbase? The userbase they have left seems extremely averse to value-added features in general, and the AI kind in particular.
Then assume they focus on integrating AI into the browser, how do they monetize it next? Sell data? Then there is no reason to choose them over Google. Charge for interference? No chance to compete against established hyperscalers there and would go against their local-first selling point.
The sad truth about platform-crucial software like a web browser is that monetizing it in any way inherently reduces it's value for users. And in case of Firefox it's a pretty small margin that keeps it competitive.
A summarizer built into the browser can be nice. To monetize add a feature to summarize OpenDocument and pdf files.
> - Start accepting small individual donations solely for the Firefox team (rather than generalized Mozilla stuff that goes on anything but Firefox). > > - Start crowdfunding for features.
Just these two things would make me happy (assuming the crowdfunding goes to the Firefox team as well).
I don't know any of the Mozilla execs but from the outside it looks an awful lot like some grifters were attracted to the free Google money and took money from the people doing the actual work.
If I'm wrong, my apologies. There just seems to be a lot of high salaries and a lot of developer layoffs.
> There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those.
And it's fine if they want to compete in that space, but they don't even seem to have the drive or desire to excel there.
To this day, I'm surprised that chromium powers electron and firefox hasn't released a compelling alternative.
> 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.
> I witnes far more people screaming against AI.
If you shove it into people's faces, they will have knee jerk reaction and hate it.
If the AI industry didn't desperately try to push it in every possible way in desperate bid to be profitable and it was just a thing that slowly gets better and is value added, not a nagging push, there would be far less of that.
But companies like MS have idea of consent of average rapist and will not even give option "no, I don't want copilot in teams", there is only "add it now" or "remind later"
"AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet.
I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
Add to that various hardware shortages caused by the AI mania or more examples of AI missuse and I wonder where we might end up eventually if people will get even angrier.
I’m quite sure that these shortages aren’t caused by mania, but oligopolies, and unpredictable countries. In undistorted markets, these should be way shorter. A year, or two maximum. At least that what supply side told us in 2020, and early 2021. It seems and predictions also say, that the shortages are with us long term. It’s even more telling that some companies leave markets where these “shortages” are, ie huge profit margins.
People tend to complain about stuff that's annoying and broken and just ignore things that work well.
Like Chrome uses AI to translate language and everyone just takes it for granted.
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.
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.
On the other hand, it also sometimes feels as if some "old media" journalists see AI as a convenient target to avenge the tech sector for disrupting them. Not that it makes AI slop any less sloppy.
Nothing prevents the prevailing trends from being utterly stupid. Just the opposite, really.
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?
Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.
And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.
And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.
But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.
Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
> simply statements of affirmation about how much they hate AI
I wonder what that might mean!
I just force quit Firefox because it was slowing the macbook with loads of memory use for nothing much running. On with Chrome... They should that sort of thing?
I have not really ever had this issue, and I use Firefox Developer Edition on an M2 Macbook Pro every work day.
I have it too. If you leave firefox running for weeks at a go, it is really bad at returning memory to the OS. m3.
> The problem is not AI. The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core
How is this not laughable?
Now we're seeing a similar thing. Everyone is talking about fucking LLMs. What, do you think FF is going to start shipping a 100GB browser? Even Llama-8B is >15GB. That would be ridiculous!
No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search. Seriously, go to their Labs tab! They let you opt in to try a feature to semantically search your browser history. That's not an LLM, that's a vector embedding model! What are they going to do next? Semantic search of a webpage? Regex search?! Even in their announcement the other day they mention the iOS "shake to summarize" and that's not even an AI they're shipping it's just a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. The only other thing they've announced is what already exists, a shortcut to use your chatbot of choice. That's not AI in the browser it is literally a split window.
| Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon.[1]
> having a faint through about removing adblock support
They said literally the opposite[1]
| At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
Literally the opposite of what you're suggestion.
Sorry, people just want to hate on Firefox.
Look, if anyone wants to be a power user there's nothing Firefox is doing from stopping them from using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet? How fucking stupid are we? We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold? It's just laughable at how much we love shooting ourselves in the foot here. We've been playing this same stupid fucking game for years and watching Chrome take more and more market share. Let FF be the browser for the masses and use a fucking fork if you care about true Scottsmen. It takes literally no technical skill to click download on a different webpage. Seriously, this is so fucking dumb.
I'm just going to link this from further down the main post. The two toots summarize it well[2]
[0] You literally have to download the translation models!
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz... (https://archive.is/20251217170357/https://www.theverge.com/t...)
[2] https://mastodon.social/@nical@mastodon.gamedev.place/115741...
I agree that the forks are the pressure release valves here. Would strongly consider switching to a fork myself.
But still I'm just wrenched by the dissonance in what new-CEO-guy said. 5 years ago or so I reported a serious bug in pointer events. If you move the mouse less than 1px the browser 5-10% of the time Firefox reports to JS that the you moved the cursor ~400pixels up and to the right or left.
Honestly this bug isn't super high impact for the web as a whole, but anyone who uses pointer events needs to work around it by smoothing the input stream. They confirmed the bug in their tracker and there it has sat for five years with no activity while the browser behaves in violation of the contract between the user and the web platform, putting an extra stumbling block in the way of every web application that allows drawing on screen with the mouse cursor.
To me, an issue like that is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dead. There's only a few reasons I can think of to leave a perfectly-reproduceable issue like that sitting for five years: 1) you don't have the energy for it, probably because so many other things are on fire 2) you don't see any value in having the trust of your users. or 3) your code is so fucked up inside that there's just no hope of figuring out why a half-pixel movement triggers a mouse would do something insane like trigger a mouse event 400 pixels away.
So now this new CEO guy comes along and says "we've lost people's trust." Wow, I think to myself, he really gets it!" Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?
Did you not literally just say you recognized that you had lost people's trust? Did you think that people didn't trust you because you hadn't tasked every engineer that wants to be able to get a promotion to work on AI!?
> Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?
Did you even look at what they're calling "AI Mode" in that link? They call it "AI Window". It's the same fucking thing as the window where you can opt in to using chatbots. That's nowhere near the same thing as pushing AI on us
See the document the new CEO linked to in his introductory blog post, which I will also link here: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
This is not a shortcut to ChatGPT. They're totally shifting directions, trying to pivot to being an AI company.
> using a fork like Mullvad or Waterfox. Those are going to keep all these AI features out. So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
The thing is most of the forks are still using some/all of the on device ML models, they're just not advertising them as AI. From Waterfoxs announcement of "Not using AI*"
>The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither.
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...
Zen:
> Based on Firefox, Zen also inherit its translation features
> people just want to hate on Firefox
While that may describe a few people, I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.
I want to love on Firefox. I've been using it since before it was "Firefox." I've championed it among co-workers and friends tirelessly. But over time, Firefox has become more and more unlovable, getting softer on privacy, altering settings in updates, foisting 'experiments' off on us, and now this AI nonsense.
I'm part of a large makerspace and have watched their market share dwindle among the nerds. Virtually no one is left.
> I don't think it fairly characterizes the backlash at all.
Again, FF added shortcuts to the 5th most popular site in the world. So what. They also have shortcuts to Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sites with their bangs. The split window for the chatbot sites? That's barely any bloat and you're not forced to use that. Nor is it even close to shipping you an LLM.
And the translate is completely opt-in. You have to fucking download the translations! They also aren't LLMs. They're like 50MB lol. But they're opt-in!
> foisting 'experiments' off on us
But if we're grabbing pitchforks for fiction then why should they care when we grab pitchforks for reality? Literally boy who cries wolf situation here and that's why I'm calling it laughable. Just as it is laughable when the OP doubled down and called the accepting of crypto donations like wearing a swastika. It is just ridiculously disingenuous and delegitimizes any serious complaints. So it is entirely counterproductive.
I'll save my pitchfork when the bullshit becomes real, not when the bullshit is based on flimsy rumors and egregious mischaracterizations. That's a witch hunt, and I don't want any part of that.
> money (which they desperately need)
True. But crypto is bad publicity and everyone knows it. At that point it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign (sorry, Poe's law triggered) and saying it's an ancient Buddhist symbol.
> No, what FF is doing is implementing features like Translate (an ALREADY opt-in feature[0]) and semantic search
Did you read my comment? The problem is that this takes focus away from the browser core. Why did they kill Servo? Were are XUL API replacements that were promised? The AI fluff could have been an extension - and that would keep everyone happy.
> It feels off-mission.
Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all. Unless that's a vibe check that's it. Somebody already posted an xkcd of it, I'm just doubling: https://xkcd.com/463/
> We're eating our cake and what, complaining that the baker's hands aren't made of gold?
Unfortunately it's pretty hard to define where "hand aren't made of gold" stops and "gotta call a HAZMAT decontamination team" starts.
> Meanwhile we're just attacking the last line of defense against Google (Chromium) taking over the internet?
The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well. It didn't lasted because of inherit incentives issue. And so if Mozilla is the last line of defense it'd better have some distinguishing features other than "we are not google". Because if they keep focusing on "average user" (btw it's my firm belief that the said user doesn't exist outside management's heads) their incentives wouldn't be any different.
> So what do we privacy maximalists care? The forks give us exactly what we want.
That's what I'm doing personally. But the forks barely have resources to remove the crap, yet alone implement new features.
> it's no better than going out wearing a swastika sign
I don't see anyone getting all up in arms about the Wayback Machine, The EFF, or plenty of others who accept cryptocurrencies as payments.
And again, to equate it to shipping a miner in the browser is BEYOND EGREGIOUS. It is nothing short of laughable.
> Than he doesn't need to talk about it at all.
> The thing is: Google started as "don't be evil" as well.
So yeah, I'm sticking with laughable. Because all you're accomplishing is handing market share to Google. All you're doing is repeating the same thing that's been happening for years. Crypto, AI, whatever, it is the same thing. People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
> This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil.
I guess that's where we disagree a lot. If Google monopolizes the web completely, it'll end up with the web dying as a relevant platform. Just like it happened with Win32 (sure, after a decade or so of constant suffering), just like it happened to minis&mainframes. Because, let's face it, being a platform monopolist isn't very profitable unless you are screwing the developers and users so hard they'll jump on the first opportunity. And it's not like the web isn't worth saving as it is now, but it is not worth saving if it is going to turn into corporate crap.
> . People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.
People expect a lawnmower to chop off their hands if they stick one into it. People don't expect a nonprofit declaring their dedication to freedoms to chop their hands off - and not even single fingers. Yes, declaring moral superiority means you will be judged a lot.
> You can call crypto a bullshit fad loved by scammers without saying anyone that accepts it is a Nazi.
I'm actually mostly on your side in this debate, but to clarify that's not actually what I think they were saying here. I think they were talking about folks who argue that the swastiki was a Buddhist symbol first so it's fine to wear it in public... They aren't technically wrong they're just assholes.
He was comparing that attitude to folks who endorse crypto, not literally calling them Nazi's.
Fair, that is a different interpretation but I still think it's a bad comparison.
> The problem is that Mozilla keeps jumping on fads instead of focusing on their browser core
No, the problem is that Mozilla needs money if they want to stop leaning off Google, and people are simply too blind by their hatred of AI that doesn't figure out that Mozilla needs money. What is giving shit loads of money right now? A-fucking-I. If their investors portfolio doesn't include AI on their products, nobody will give them even a second look, much less the funds they need. Mozilla isn't jumping on fads, it's jumping towards were money is.
You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow. Otherwise, you are a consumer of a free product and you don't get to decide how the free product gets financed. Luckily for you, they haven't decided to make _you_ the product.
And how exactly is the AI going to give Mozilla money? I mean not investor money, but actual profit? By alienating their moat userbase (privacy-minded technies)? Because if not for the AI haters, nobody would care about Firefox __at all__.
Funding end-user-facing FOSS is hard. An OS kernel or a DMBS can count on corporations that need new features providing funding. A browser can't. But then if small individual donations aren't enough for them (I think there's still no way to donate to Firefox directly?) they don't have a product.
By selling the default LLM slot, exactly the same way they sell the default search engine slot.
Mozilla could instead stop giving all the google money to a CEO who only knows how to say "me too! AI too!"
Maybe hire some engineers instead?
Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.
By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.
A-fucking-I doesn't make the product better. Mozilla constantly runs in every direction other than what their core users want or need.
> You want Mozilla to stop doing that? Guarantee their moneis flow.
Sure, just as soon as they sell something a privacy focused user of a browser wants. Privacy focused password management built into Firefox with paid sync or enterprise integration. Privacy focused paid email hosting, works great with Thunderbird. Had they done any of this back in the day, I'd gladly have paid for it and trusted them over smaller names or Google.
I'm sure they're getting lots of money to throw around playing with the new shiny, but that's not going to keep their users, or keep them happy.
They lost a ton of market share when the browser was slow as an old dog and chrome came on the scene, but they didn't do nearly enough to make up for it.
Interestingly, Proton does a lot of what you're talking about: email hosting, password management, cloud storage, docs and spreadsheets. The only thing they don't have is their own browser.
Proton started banning journalists and political dissidents, so they're a joke now.
They have some of that. Password sync is free for example though. (If private enough for you) and they have email relay and vpn as a paid feature
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).
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.
There are many features you are not using in all your software. Just being there, should not be a problem for people. You should evaluate a software by what it's giving you, and which harm it brings, not by what it's giving others you do not care about.
And so far, we can assume that AI in Firefox will be like all the other stuff people don't care about, just optional, a button here, a menu-entry there, just waiting for interaction, but not harmful.
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.
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.
The metaverse is here to stay! Blockchain is the future!
Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!
They did actually jump on metaverse with Firefox reality and Mozilla hubs. Both weren't bad products at all. Both are now cancelled and they have done basically nothing for Mozilla's market position.
Edit: so I mean I agree here in case that wasn't clear
Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?
> or get left behind.
Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.
Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:
There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.
Compare and contrast with AI:
LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.
A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.
Non corporate VR is actually doing some interesting things - but yeah, what Meta did with it was pure garbage.
I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)
Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.
Well stated, agreed. :)
Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).
I don't think it's quite that simple. A great deal of work has nothing to do with computers, and even more human activity has nothing to do with economic advantage. The scope of your statement is a bit too broad in that regard but for computer based work I think you are a) more or less right but b) if you are right it's not clear how much economic benefit LLMs will actually provide on balance, long term.
Does it make the world a better place, and more prosperous? Does it just move economic activity around a bit in regards to who is doing what? We'll find out in ten years when the retrospective economic studies are done.
People wonder why there's a backlash when the pro-AI side sounds like the Borg.
I disagree and I think the moment is now. Gemini 2.5 and now 3.0 is incredible. People that don’t recognize that and use AI tools now are as silly as a craftsman that uses a hammer as a screwdriver when he has a screwdriver in his toolbox. A good craftsman uses the right tool for the job to save time and do a better job and knows the limitations of each tool.
I can spend hours learning photoshop and then trying out color schemes for my new intricately detailed historic house or removing a car from the driveway or I can use Nano Banana and be done in a prompt. There is dignity in learning all that minutiae but I don’t care, I’m not a Photoshop artist, I just want the result and to just move on with my life and get the house painted.
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.
> 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.
While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out, there's definitely evidence that the models can keep improving until that point.
"Sooner or later", given the trend lines, is sill enough to do to SWEng what Wikipedia did to Encyclopædia Britannica: Still exists, but utterly changed.
> While I expect the improvements to slow down and stop, due to the money running out
This will certainly happen with the models that use weird proprietary licenses, which people only contribute to if they're being paid, but open ones can continue beyond that point.
The hyperscalers are buying enough compute and energy to distort the market, enough money thrown at them to distort the US economy.
Open models, even if 100% of internet users joined an AI@HOME kind of project, don't have enough resources to do that.
You are right, machine learning models usually improve with more data and more parameters. Open model will never have enough resources to reach a compatible quality.
However, this technology is not magic, it is still just statistics, and during inference it looks very much like your run of the mill curve fitting (just in a billion parameter space). An inherent problem in regression analysis is that at some point you have too many parameters, and you are actually fitting the random errors in your sample (called overfitting). I think this puts an upper limit on the capabilities of LLMs, just like it does for the rest of our known tools of statistics.
There is a way to prevent that though, you can reduce the number of parameters and train a specialized model. I would actually argue that this is the future of AI algorithms and LLMs are kind of a dead end with usefulness limited to entertainment (as a very expensive toy). And that current applications of LLMs will be replaced by specialized models with fewer parameters, and hence much much much cheaper to train and run. Specialized models predate LLMs and we have a good idea of how an open source model fares in that market.
And it turns out, open source specialized models have proven them selves quite nicely actually. In go we have KataGo which is one of the best models on the market. Similarly in chess we have Stockfish.
> 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.
> 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.
Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
> Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
I think half the people who think AI is incredibly dumb and can't understand why anyone is using it is because they're using the free samples. This whole thing is so horribly expensive that they lose money even on people who pay therefore the free samples are necessarily as minimal as they can get away with.
The free samples worked famously initially to get people to try it initially, though.
But whenever that free Gemini text pops up in my search, I know why people think it's stupid. But that's not the experience I have with paid options.
> 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!
> > 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.
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.
if you have to understand exactly what you're doing, why not just... do it?
That question completely misunderstands what AI is for. Why would I just do it when the AI did it for me in less time that I could myself and mechanically in a way that is arguably harder for a human to do? AI is surprisingly good at identifying all the edge cases.
i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?
but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.
It seems to me you're coming in with a negative preconceptions (e.g. "insipid, pandering chatbot"). What part about coding is fun for you? What part is boring? Keep the fun bits and take the boring bits and have the LLM do those.
> Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller.
I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
> AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe
I would liken it more to dynamite.
> I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
Why would I accept slop out of the AI? I don't. So I don't have any.
I don't understand the disconnect here. Some people really want to be extremely negative about this pretty amazing technology while the rest of us have just incorporated it into our workflow.
> How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
I don't, hence why I have to take your word for it.
The PRs that people have submitted where they either told me up front or admitted to using AI after the review probed as to why they would be inconsistent in their library usage were not good and required substantial rework.
Yes, some people may submit PRs that used AI and were good. But if so, they haven't told me but I would have hoped that people advocating it would have either told me or got me to review, said it is good, and then told me it was a test and the AI passed. So far that hasn't happened, so I'm not convinced it's a regular occurrence.
Maybe the problem with understanding the benefits of AI is that you are relying on other people to use AI properly. As the direct user myself, I don't have that problem.
I'm using it to make things better rather than just producing. Even just putting it in agent mode and saying "look at all my code and tell me where I can make it better" is an interesting exercise. Some suggestions I take, some I don't.
> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Exactly why I am baffled. You would think they could read the writing on the wall.
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.
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.
Video games are incredibly popular and my mom plays them, does that mean Firefox should have video games baked in at the base layer?
Firefox needs to immediately build Candy Crush into the browser. Users expect to be able to access Candy Crush and only at the layer of web browser can such a thing be implemented.
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.
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.
+ Children are growing up with ChatGPT and Gemini. It has already become the de facto standard for learning. AI in browsers is inevitable.
"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?