- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”
You must log in or # to comment.
Hey all, just a reminder to keep the community rules in mind when commenting on this thread. Criticism in any direction is fine, but please maintain your civility and don’t stoop to ad-hominem etc. Thanks.
don’t stoop to ad-hominem
At this point Ad-hominem is practically the nice name for the business model “enshitification”.
deleted by creator
If it can be proven that an LLM bot account is present on the instance masquerading as a human user, I would recommend you report the account for that reason/spam so that it can be investigated and removed per instance rule 4 after evidence is found.
Since they aren’t people, I’d say it’s pointless to reply to them with ad-hominem in the first place since it means nothing to them, and therefore reporting it would be the more effective action to take in any event.
Well if they do I’ll just switch to whatever browser that doesn’t.
When I want AI, I use this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1
My worry about AI built into my browser is that it’ll be turned into data mining, training, and revenue generation resulting in exploitation and manipulation of me.
I’ve actually flipped on this position - but before you pull out your pitchforks and torches, please listen to what I have to say.
Do we want mass surveillance through SaaS? No. Do we want mass breach of copyright just because it’s a small holder and not some giant publisher - I.e “rules for thee” type vibe? Hell no. But do we throw the baby out with the bath water? Also: heck no. But let’s me underline a few facts.
- AI currently requires power greedy chips that also don’t utelize memory effectively enough
- Because of this it’s relegated to massive, globe heating infrastructure
- SaaS will always, always track you and harvest your data
- Said data will be used in marketing and psy-ops to manipulate you, your children and your community
- The more they track, the better their models become, which they’ll keep under lock and key
- More and more devices are coming with NPUs and TPUs on-chip
- That is the hardware has not caught up to the software yet
See where I’m going with this?
Add to the fact that people like their chatbots and can even learn to use them responsibly, but as long as they’re feeding the corpos, it’ll be used against them. Not only that, but in true silicon valley fashion, it’ll be monopolized.
The libre movement exists to bring power back to the user by fighting these conditions. It’s also a very good idea to standardize things so that it’s not hidden behind a proprietary API or service.
That’s why if Mozilla seeks to standardize locally run AI models by way of the browser, then that’s a good thing! Again; not if they’re feeding some SaaS.
But it their goal and their implementation is to bring models to the general consumer so that they can seize the means of computing, then that’s a good thing!
Again, if you’d rather just kick up dust and bemoan the idiocy and narcissistic nature of Silicon Valley, then you’ve already given them what they want - that they, and they alone, get to be the sole proprietaries of AI that is standardized. That’s like giving the average user over to a historically predatory ilk who’d rather build an autocracy than actually innovate.
Mozilla can be the hero we need. They can actually focus on consumer hardware, to give people what they want WITHOUT mass tracking and data harvesting.
That is if they want to. I’m not saying they’re not going to bend over, but they need the right kind of push back. They need to be told “local AI only - no SaaS” and then they can focus on creating web standards for local AI, effectively becoming the David to Silicon Valleys Goliath.
I know this is an unpopular opinion and I know the Silicon Valley barons are a bunch of sociopaths with way too much money, but we can’t give them monopoly over this. That would be bad!! We need to give the power to the user, and that means standardization!
Take it from an old curmudgeon. I’ve shook my fist at the cloud, I’ve read a ton of EULAs and I’ve opposed many predatory practices. But we need to understand that the user wants what the user wants. We can’t stick our heads in the sand and just repeat “AI bad” ad nauseum. We need to mobilize against the central giants.
We need a local AI movement and Mozilla could be in the forefront of this, if it weren’t for the pushback and outright cynicism people trevall generally (and justifiably) have - but we can’t let these cretinous bastards hold all the AI cards.
We need libre AI, and we need it now!
Thank you for your consideration.
They’re really trying to shove this down our throats aren’t they?
The post stresses the feature will be opt-in and that the user “is in control.”
Nothingburger
Personally I don’t want AI anywhere.
I can think of some uses
But I’m feeling really sadistic today, and it mostly just boils down to ‘forced ‘paranoia’ larp’.
I think Mozilla’s base is privacy focused individuals, a lot of them appreciating firefox’s opensource nature and the privacy hardened firefox forks. From a PR perspective, Firefox will gain users by adamantly going against AI tech.
Maybe their thought process is they’ll gain more users by adopting AI while knowing they’re still the most privacy focused of the major browsers. Where have I seen this mentality before?
Spoiler
The American Democrat party often believes it can get more votes by shifting conservative, believing the more progressive voters will stick pick them because they’re still more progressive than not.
Just render the page, page renderer.
monkey paw: curls
Yes, the page has been rendered by a large webpage model based on the URL.
Why not just distribute a separate build and call it “Firefox AI Edition” or something? Making this available in the base binary is a big mistake. At least doing so immediately and without testing the waters.
There is a Firefox Developer’s Edition so I don’t see why not? I personally don’t care to see them waste the time on AI features.
The more AI is being pushed into my face, the more it pisses me off.
Mozilla could have made an extension and promote it on their extension store. Rather than adding cruft to their browser and turning it on by default.
The list of things to turn off to get a pleasant experience in Firefox is getting longer by the day. Not as bad as chrome, but still.
Switching to de-Mozilla’d Firefox (Waterfox) is as simple as copying your profile folder from FF to WF. Everything transfers over, and I mean everything. No mozilla corp, no opting out of shit in menus at all.
Oh this triggers me. There have been multiple good suggestions for Firefox in the past that are closed with nofix as “this can be provided by the community as an add-on”. Yet they shove the crappiest crap into the main browser now.
Hear me out.
This could actually be cool:
-
If I could, say, mash in “get rid of the junk in this page” or “turn the page this color” or “navigate this form for me”
-
If it could block SEO and AI slop from search/pages, including images.
-
If I can pick my own API (including local) and sampling parameters
-
If it doesn’t preload any model in RAM.
…That’d be neat.
What I don’t want is a chatbot or summarizer or deep researcher because there are 7000 bajillion of those, and there is literally no advantage to FF baking it in like every other service on the planet.
And… Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs. Not even the most exotic experimental quantization of Qwen3 30B is ‘good enough’ to be reliable for the average person, and it still takes too much CPU/RAM. And whatever Mozilla ships would be way worse.
That could change with a good bitnet model, but no one with money has pursued it yet.
That would be awesome. Like a greasemonkey/advanced unlock for those of us who don’t know how to code. So many times I wanted to customise a website but I don’t know how or it’s not worth the effort.
But only of it was local, and specially on mobile, where I need the most, it will be impossible for years…
I mean, you can run small models on mobile now, but they’re mostly good as a cog in an automation pipeline, not at (say) interpreting english instructions on how to alter a webpage.
…Honestly, open weight model APIs for single-off calls like this are not a bad stopgap. It costs basically nothing, you can use any provider you want, its power efficient, and if you’re on the web, you have internet.
You know what would be really cool? If I could just ask AI to turn off the AI in my browser. Now that would be cool.
I can’t fucking believe I’m agreeing with a .world chud.
Well fortunately for you, I don’t know what that means.
Your server has not a monopoly on, but a majority of the worst shitlibs and other chuds. To the point I’m genuinely surprised by agreeing with someone there, and am worried that when i examine it closely youll be agreeing with me for some unthinkably horrible reason.
-
I am actually curious if gentoo community sees a noticeable increase in time for updating/installing with all these new AI features on everything.
Cannot wait for Servo & LadyBird to take off
I’m thoroughly sick of Mozilla’s shit.
You want AI in your browser? Just add <your favourite spying ad machine> as a “search engine” option, with a URL like
https://chatgpt.com/?q=%25s, with a shortcut like
@ai. You can then ask it anything right there in your search bar.Maybe also add one with a URL with some query pre-written like
https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page for me: %sas
@aisor something, modern chatbots have the ability to make HTTP requests for you. Then if you want to summarize the page you’re on, you do Ctrl+L Ctrl+C @ais Ctrl+V Enter. There, I solved all your AI needs with 4 shortcuts without literally any client-side code.Emissions. Economic problems. Goading several people into suicide.
Like, if you ship a food item with harmful bacteria in it, it gets recalled. If you have a fatal design flaw in a car, it gets recalled. If your LLM encourages people to separate from their loved ones and kill themselves, nothing fucking happens.
