Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.
Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.
I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.
Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.
[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.
You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).
Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.
So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.
Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
Everyone wants to complain about the "bloat" in Windows and macOS (and fair enough, there is a lot of bloat and cruft) but blame it all on capitalism, when Linux has kept apace in growth rate the whole time. My Linux installs have been 'round about 50% the size of my Windows installs these last 15 years, never really straying far. If we ask ourselves, "Why does Linux need to keep growing?", I think we can easily see that OS churn and growth is not just "shareholder value gotta go up."
Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden nonsensical moves.
> Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.
And this is why the subscription model just doesn’t make sense for most businesses. I pay for a newspaper subscription because there is literally a brand new newspaper each day. A magazine subscription yields an entirely new set of articles every month. I pay for subscription access to data that is continuously updated. The subscription model makes sense for a product that is created anew on a regular basis. It doesn’t make sense for most software companies that are producing static software. What they are calling ‘subscriptions’ are really just rentals for their static products that get minimal surface changes to justify the ongoing rent charge. I’d much rather just pay a flat fee for the static software and upgrade it when I’m ready for the new features.
Honestly it’s the first iOS I like less than the last. A lot I’d consider neutral.
But now I’ve got several bugs (and I’m on last years flagship), liquid glass is ugly until you change a guy of settings, and I find myself accidentally triggering something (usually Siri) and being annoyed more.
It’s funny because lately I’ve been playing Arknights which is a gatcha game which is unusually good for free players. It has a few icons that light up with one of those dots when you have something to attend to (say you got a token to upgrade a character) but there is the dark pattern that that dot is always set on the cash store which means it is always set on the “stores” section which has substores for in-game currencies some of which you have to attend to periodically. So I see the dark pattern there.
Really my complaint is anything that covers up content; if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px above or below the page to show me something I’d complain about lot less — but if I had my way anything unwanted that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don’t want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car or truck!)
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda
All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor
4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind
5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment
6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature
7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically
Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP.
So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
In the 90s I did a lot of AI research but we weren't allowed to call it AI because if you used that label your funding would instantly be cancelled. After this bubble pops we'll no doubt return to that situation. Sigh.
This sounds great actually. It seems like a fantastic revenue opportunity. We can add mandatory AI to all our products. We can then offer a basic plan that removes AI from most products, except in-demand ones. To remove it their you'll need the premium plan. There's a discount for annual subscription. You can also get the "Friends and Family" plan that covers 12 devices, but is region locked. If you go too far from your domicile, the AI comes back. This helps keep user indoors, streaming, and watching ads. Business plans will have the option to disable AI if their annual bill exceeds a certain amount. We can align this amount such that encourages typical business accounts to grow by a modest percent each year. We'll do this by setting the amount low enough that businesses are incentived to purchase but also high enough that they windup buying significant services from us. This potentially allows us to sell them services they don't need or that don't even exist, as the demand for AI free products is projected to rise in a 2-10 year timeframe.
> where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
That's the core issue. No one wants to fail early or fail fast anymore. It's "lets stick to our guns and push this thing hard and far until it actually starts working for us."
Sometimes the time just isn't right for a particular technology. You put it out there, try for a little bit, and if it fails, it fails. Move on.
You don't keep investing in your failure while telling your users "You think you don't want this, but trust us, you actually do."
> The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Salesforce and Adobe want to advance an agenda other than selling product and giving their C-suite nice bonuses.
I think you can explain a lot of this as:
1. Executives (CEOs, CTOs, VPs, whatever) got convinced that AI is the new growth thing
2. AI costs a _lot_ of money relative to most product enhancements, so there's an inherent need to justify that expense.
3. All of the unwanted and pushy features are a way of creating metrics that justify the expense of AI for the C-suite.
4. It takes time for users to effectively say "We didn't want this," and in the meantime a whole host of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers have gotten promoted and/or better gigs because they could say "we added AI" to their product.
There's also a herd effect among competing products that tends to make these things go in waves.
I think the real takeaway here is that Jensen Huang was smart enough to found a technology company that developed innovative products with real consumer demand. He's also smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall regarding consumer market demand saturation for high-margin products. No matter what happens with AI, Huang will be recorded as having executed the greatest pivot of all time in terms of company direction.
I think in the case of in-app tooltips, the cause is much more banal: it's UX managers having to defend their team and budget with usage metrics, and so they all try to shove their new features in your face to inflate their numbers.
If we didn't have pervasive telemetry, we also wouldn't have these obnoxious nudges; UX teams would get their feedback from QA testing and focus groups, and leave the end users in peace.
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
Bob the Barber ain't doin shit but that's mostly because he's got a room temperature IQ and is already struggling with taxes and biz-dev. he can do a mean fade, tho.
some weeks if its slow he may struggle to make his rent for his apartment; he doesn't have time or capacity to engage in serious rent-seeking behavior.
but hair cut chains like Supercuts are absolutely engaging in shady behavior all the time, like games with how solons rent chairs or employing questionably legal trafficked workers.
and FYI turns out that Supercuts a wholly owned subsidiary of the Regis Corporation, who absolutely acquires other companies and plays all sorts of shady corporate games, including branching into other markets and monopoly efforts.
It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true. For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on corporate monopolies and power in the US).
> The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago.
> Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years.
I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI every frickin' day and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate. [2]
I'd really like to see Mozilla move anywhere but the bay area, whether that is Dublin or Denver. When you aren't hanging out with "big tech" people at lunch and after work and when you have to get in a frickin' airplane to meet with those people you might start to "think different" and get some empathy for users and produce a better product and be a viable business as opposed to another out-of-touch and unaccountable NGO.
[1] Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma that companies like Kodak and Xerox die because they are focused on the needs of their current customers who could care less about the new shiny that can't satisfy their needs now but will be superior in say 15 years. Now we have The FOMO Dilemma which is best illustrated by Windows 8 which went in a bold direction (tabletization) that users were completely indifferent to: firms now introduce things that their existing customers hate because they read The Innovator's Dilemma and don't want to wind up like Xerox.
[2] we use Firefox because we hate that corporate garbage.
My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub, with some component of their funding coming from the EU, where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.
It's not a popular opinion but if I was the EU I would do the following:
(1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip something bad in)
(2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly revenue"
I liked the original Opera—it’s been a while, but I think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, long time ago—but I’m not sure they were ever a “potential Mozilla,” at least in the way I would interpret that. They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by a for-profit company.
(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.
Not once in the history of tech “the free market” has succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots of money from doing something they want.
This is yet again confusing a free market with an unregulated one. A free market is a market, where all costs are included (no external costs), so that market participants can make free decisions that will lead to the best outcome. To price in all external costs, regulation is needed.
Sure, if the common denominator user is at least as savvy as the entire marketing and strategy departments of these trillion dollar companies, then sure, users will identify products that are not designed according to their best interests and will then perfectly coordinate their purchases so that such products fail in the marketplace. Sure.
One of the problems with that idea is that sometimes it will be far more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they want and because eventually making the most amount of money possible becomes the only thing that matters to a company, what users want gets ignored and users are forced to settle for whats available.
I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings.
https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.
Google Wave... what an amazing piece of work just thrown in the trash.
I never used any of its collaboration features, just looked at them. I did use it as a friendly-for-non-geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST. And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was cheap and light and worked).
The reason Google Wave failed so spectacularly was that Google's Marketing team insisted on copying the "invite only rollout" that was so successful for Google Mail.
The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites feel even more special, etc...
Google Wave had no existing standard to leverage, making it 100.00% useless if you couldn't invite EVERYBODY you needed to collaborate with. But you couldn't! You weren't allowed! They had to wait for an invite. Days? Weeks? Months? Years!? Who knows!
There was a snowball's chance in hell that this marketing approach could possibly work for a collaboration tool like Google Wave, but Google knew better. They knew better than every journalist that pointed this obvious flaw out. They knew better than every blog post, Slashdot commenter, etc...
It was one of the most spectacular failures caused by self-important hubris that I've ever seen in any industry.
It lost its "momentum" by then. The marketing got "early adopters" excited, the kind that would evangelise a platform, but they were blocked because either they couldn't get in themselves, or couldn't invite their colleagues. By the time Google realised their mistake and provided access to everyone without an invite, it was far too late.
Sorry, I didn't mean it actually got renamed, just that all the collaboration junk that people did in Wave still can be done almost exactly the same in Google Docs, with the added benefit that people actually know what it is and how to use it.
It was more than just "if we build our version of Facebook." It was, "if we kill off every other social like thing we have and force people into circles, we can build our own Facebook." Google Buzz, in particular, was a fairly well done integration with Google Reader and Google Mail. I legit had discussions about articles with close friends because of it. But, alas, no. Had to die because their social was supposed to be Plus.
I'm trying to remember all of the crap integrations with the likes of Youtube that were pushed. Just, screw that stuff. And quit trying to make yet another new messenger app!
I don't see Google Plus as hubris. I just think they saw a threat in Facebook and felt they had to try and build a competing product (and happened to have the time/money to invest).
Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've been hubris.
My read on the whole Google Plus thing was that they drastically underestimated the difficulty of convincing people to actually use it. They clearly had the expertise to build it, and they had some interesting ideas with their circles of friends or whatever they called them (though I think they missed the mark on how they used them). But they couldn’t convince anyone to actually use it.
Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so. So many of the choices they made were needlessly user hostile (e.g. real name requirements) that it seems like they assumed it would be a given that people would want to use it. When they later realized their error they tried to cram it down everyone’s throats with stuff like YouTube comments only working from Google Plus accounts.
> Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so.
I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence you think you're not wrong. :)
At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as it proved to be.
I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same time, eg with circles).
(Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.
Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid take and an engaging comment.
I think I could pretty easily have been persuaded by Google Plus. At that time I had broadly positive sentiments towards Google. Two things put me off.
Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+] logins. That rubbed me the wrong way.
Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different "circles" of friends. It sounded very complicated and I was worried that I'd publish something snarky to the wrong group of friends :)
I wonder how many others had the same concern? Given that Steve Yegge accidentally published one of his rants to the public that was meant purely for internal Google consumption (I think that was on G+ ...?) that might have been a legit thing to be wary of.
There was also the very minor annoyance of G+ taking over the + operator in Google search (previously you could say +keyword instead of "keyword" to force literal search), but I don't think that would have swayed me against joining.
All that is true, but the primary problem with Google Plus was the network effect. Whenever I logged into Google plus, most of the content from friends was basically “cool, so this is Google plus” and nothing else, because everything at the time was on Facebook. Later Google started filling my feed with stuff from strangers because there was no organic content from people I actually cared about.
If you can’t solve the chicken and egg problem of engagement then nothing else really matters.
I'd probably have signed up if it were not for those two issues. Step zero in breaking the network effect is not to piss off those who might join despite it.
Google Plus was insanely disastrous. And there was a guy, generally well respected, who was in charge of search I think? who went around advocating for Google Plus on forums, and people responding: if one needs Google Plus to find things, doesn't that mean that search is bad? But he didn't seem to make the connection, or he pretended not to.
I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
I think a lot of the pushiness is a frantic effort to keep the bubble inflated and keep the market out of the trough of disillusionment. It won't work. The trough of disillusionment is inevitable. There is no jumping straight from peak of inflated expectations straight to the slope of enlightenment, because the market fundamentally needs the cleansing action of the trough of disillusionment to shake out the theoreticals and the maybes and get to what actually works.
Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and the things needing to prove themselves to get to real sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff is while they don't tell the market how few people actually chose to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a metric when it was pushed on them.
>I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice these two are currently inextricable; if there's AI in the product, then it will be pushed / impossible to turn off / take resources away from actual product improvement.
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it.
I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade, really stuck with it through WSL's development... But the first time I saw internet ads on my start menu search result was kind of it for me, I switched my default boot to Linux and really haven't looked back. I don't really need Windows for my workflows, and though I'm using Windows for my current job, I'm at a point I'd rather not be.
Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7 IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar, that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting, continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS, etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare. They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and convenient as mac + iOS.
Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world where they make their cash.
Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as something you interact with directly all together and make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means.
I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have made.
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
I know I used to have a phone that didn't do this and I used to make fun of my friends¡Phone because it would do this, then I got a new phone (android) and it did. Karma I guess, can you also disable it on ¡Phone?
I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen.
Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.
Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)
You can disable AI in Google products.
E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.
And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?
Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a subscription fee?]".
My iPhone has a permanent red badge counter trying to get me to upgrade to iCloud. I've moved the settings icon so I don't see it normally, but it is nagging. There's other dark patterns used by Apple to try and increase their income by "asking" me to pay more.
What's even worse is that every time you sign into a google account without a phone number or home address associated with it, it screams at you to add them for sECurItY
Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication, it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit "No"
YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in the general YouTube results... I like historical content, but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.
Depends; in the EU and selected countries that setting was always opt-in (i.e. it was never enabled for you). Elsewhere I guess the user has to periodically check their settings, or privacy policies, etc, which in practice sounds impossible.
> Important: By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI to move around after the document is opened. The other day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is that I can get an ID card with an online account... not the various plan deductibles or anything useful like that.
I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want a summary instead of generating it automatically.
It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example: Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old) Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail interface. ONE checkbox in the sea of gmail options?
Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly.
I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better.
I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal position and software uis keep turning into a constant game of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual menu or send button is.
ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.
The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions.
LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them.
The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans.
If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone.
That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".
Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)
That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used!
ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle. For that matter, neither have most website makers who constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a high Z-index.
I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.
If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out.
Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.
Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”
As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)
The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!
I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)
Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio, not text, and it can run on your mobile phone.
It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.
It’s an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio (language?) and transcription.
Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?
Whisper is an encoder decoder transformer. The input is audio spectrograms, the output is text tokens. It is an improvement over old school transcription methods because it’s trained on audio transcripts, so it makes contextually plausible predictions.
Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it’s indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more important question is how these things are used in the UX. Decoders don’t have to be annoying, that is a product choice.
Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.
On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
I'm not going to defend the youtube captions as good, but even still, I find them incredibly helpful. My hearing is fine, but my processing is rubbish, and having a visual aid to help contextualize the sound is a big help, even when they're a bit wrong.
Your point about the caption language is probably right though. It's worse with jargon or proper names, and worse with non-American English speakers. If we they don't even get right all the common accents of English, I have little hope for other languages.
Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily depends on implied rather than explicit context.
The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot." But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)
Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less about how it's structured.
Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube includes a human-provided translation as captions. Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up entirely.
I assume people talk about transcription, not translation. Translation in youtube ime is indeed horrible in all languages I have tried, but transcription in english is good enough to be useful. However, the more technical jargon a video uses, the worse transcription is (translation is totally useless in anything technical there).
Automatic transcription in English heavily depend on accent, sound quality, and how well the speaker is articulating. It will often mistake words that sound alike to make non-sensible sentences, randomly skip words, or just inserts random words for no clear reason.
It does seem to do a few clever things. For lyrics it seem to first look for existing transcribed lyrics before making their own guesses (Timing however can be quite bad when it does this). Outside of that, AI transcribed videos is like an alien who has read a book on a dead language and is transcribing based on what the book say that the word should sound like phonetically. At times that can be good enough.
(A note on sound quality. It not the perceived quality. Many low res videos has perfectly acceptable, if somewhat lossy sound quality, but the transcriber goes insane. It likes prefer 1080p videos with what I assume much higher bit-rate for the sound.)
In the times I have noticed the transcription be bad, my speech comprehension itself is even worse. So I still find it useful. It is not substitution for human created (or at least curated) subtitles by any means, but better than nothing.
Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but would love to be proven wrong.
There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.
I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis.
For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others.
When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word.
Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
Ah yes, one of the standard replies whenever anyone mentions a way that an AI thing fails: "You're still using [X]? Well of course, that's not state of the art, you should be using [Y]."
You don't actually state whether you believe Parakeet is susceptible to the same class of mistakes...
It's an extremely common goalpost-moving pattern on HN, and it adds little to the conversation without actually addressing how or whether the outcome would be better.
Try it, or don't. Due to the nature of generative AI, what might be an issue for me might not be an issue for you, especially if we have differing use cases, so no one can give you the answer you seek except for yourself.
I doubt that people prefer automatic capitations over human made, no more than people prefer AI subtitles. The big AI subtitle controversy going on right now in anime demonstrate well that quite a lot is lost in translation when an AI is guessing what words are most likely in a situation, compared to a human making a translation.
What people want is something that is better than nothing, and in that sense I can see how automatic captions is transformative in terms of accessibility.
ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of the oldest examples.
These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.
Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI.
I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.
That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does.
So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
"AI" is the only term that makes sense for end users because "AI" is the only term that is universally understood. Hackernews types tend to overlook the layman.
And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an inaccurate term because it's not. That's exactly what we are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to describing the implementation, and, honestly, what difference does it make for most people using it.
It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high level in most contexts.
Right now? John McCarthy invented the term in order to get a grant, or in other words it was a marketing buzzword from day zero. He says so himself in the lighthill debate, and then the audience breaks out into hoots and howls.
But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole,
but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable.
Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is,
and that is mostly hype and marketing.
Thus I have turned my language on its head,
specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean,
and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV.
I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025,
taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.
Wow, you are an optimist. I do feel "it's close", but I wouldn't bet this close. But I wouldn't argue either, I don't know. Also, when it really pops, the consequences will be more disastrous than the bubble itself feels right now. It's literally hundreds of billions in circular investing. It's absurd.
I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.
I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks.
That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.
Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.
Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0]
Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.
But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.
Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you, the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey) that changes the page for you. This means you only make one request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the page from that point on.
I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.
The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another
I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.
AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you.
However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat.
Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.
Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them.
There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence.
Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards.
Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!
Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!
More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites.
The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility.
If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.
3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.
If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.
Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that.
in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.
That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc..
try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just
disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it.
But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out"
is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to
eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better
than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely
use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install
an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from
Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice.
The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said
since years that we, the people, need back control over the
world wide web. That includes the UI.
That's what I've been saying for some time now...
"No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't.
Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.
Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.
And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to.
I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer.
It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.
What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.
Have you considered Raycast? I don’t use it for those features myself, but it is extensible and has a large community, so even if it can’t do those things by default, I’m sure you could configure it to.
For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page.
The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.
The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more
Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.
Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.
I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything meaningful.
I'm "properly educated" by most definitions, 95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine. Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books and movies and many other things before deciding to read or watch the entire work.
>95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine.
Mmm, summarized garbage.
>Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books
This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however. Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.
That should be a next step. It takes too much time to read summary. So the result should be a summary picture! Text based image generation is quite good now. How would you call this chatgpt feature?
If someone wanted to do this for whatever reason, there's actually a language that can be written exclusively in emojis. It's called toki pona, and while emojis aren't the standard writing system, there have been several proposals. It works well since toki pona has a very small syntax (only around ~150 words iirc)
Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode, glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go to chatgpt.com
I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code I’m looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together.
There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.
I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement.
Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:
1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!
1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.
1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?
2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.
2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.
I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.
You already know that they aren't. Yesterday my wife and I were discussing Rønja Røverdatter. When we were kids it used to have danish talk over, so you could still hear the original swedish sound as well. Now it has been dubbed, and we were talking about the actor who voices Birk. Anyway, we looked him up and found out he was in Blinkende Lygter, which neither of us remebered. So we asked Gemini and it told us he played the child flashback actor of the main character... except he doesn't, and to make matters worse, Gemini said that he played Christian a young Torkil... So it even got the names wrong. Sure this isn't exactly something Gemini would know, considering Rønja Røverdatter is an old Astrid Lingren novel that was turned to film decades ago, and Blinkende Lygter is a Danish movie from 20ish years ago where Sebastian Jessen plays a tiny role. Since they are prediction engines though, they'll happily give you a wrong answer because that's what the math added up to.
I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
I've done some summarizing with my own small Tcl/Tk-based frontend that uses llama.cpp to call Mistral Small (i.e. all is done locally) and i do know that it can be off about various things.
However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an accurate summary but because i come across some overly long article that i do not even know if i'm interested in reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or not.
For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct, just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect, the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd do without the summary anyway since because i need to run my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in already biased against reading.
It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add something to this discussion.
How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?
To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article. And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the article says from a headline.
So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are correct enough for the purpose they serve.
You can make a better decision if you have the context of the actual thing you are reading, both in terms of how it's presented (the non-textual aspects of a webpage for instance) and the language used. You can get a sense of who the intended audience might be, what their biases might be, how accurate this might be, etc. By using a summarizing tool all that is lost, you give up using your own faculties to understand and judge, and instead you put your trust in a third party which uses its own language, has its own biases, etc.
Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there become slop, does any of this matter?
Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion.
> And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?
You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is this a real question?
"Get me the recipe from this page" feels like a place where I do really care that it gets it right, because in an unfamiliar recipe it doesn't take much hallucination around the ingredients to ruin the dish.
I guess I never come across that situation because I just don’t engage with sources that fluff. That is a good example, but presumably, there should be no errors there because it’s just stripping away unnecessary stuff? Although, you would have to trust the LLM doesn’t get rid of or change a key step in the process, which I still don’t feel comfortable trusting.
I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict its result to a single web page.
Because I can get content I want there, and with a summarisatin option, it is irrelevant to me if they don't "respect my time" because it doesn't take any more time for me to get at the actual recipe.
Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't usually matter.
For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
Determining whether something is worth reading doesn't require a good summary, just one that contains enough relevant snippets to give a decent indication.
The opportunity cost of "missing out" on reading a page you're unsure enough about to want a summary of is not likely to be high, and similarly it doesn't matter much if you end up reading a few paragraphs before you realise you were misled.
There are very few tasks where we absolutely must have accurate information all the time.
Articles. Some articles I fully read, some others I just read the headline, and some others I want to spend 2 minutes reading the summary to know whether I want to read the full thing.
I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it.
If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.
I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a complete rework of everything "designed for agents".
Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a word?)
I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.
I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past, recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value.
Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.
It’s great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been easier.
There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.
I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."
For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.
Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".
I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.
Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?
It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my machines to be predictable and stupid.
Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent, meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition, getting better IDE tooling, and such.
I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI".
For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do.
The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.
Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI has not really improved anything.
AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.
What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it?
Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.
Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.
It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.
It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.
I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format.
I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.
I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh
I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp! So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into nothing be damned!
Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.
Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.
If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video.
We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-technical people think it's another thing they have to learn and do not want to (except for those who have been conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is not a picture of mental health or stability for anyone). They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices.
They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.
This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.
No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.
I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it.
I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".
Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time.
Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.
Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now)
So, yes, I want AI in "everything".
And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.
I don't think it exemplifies that at all. Using Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche fallback to the lack of an integrated AI solution.
The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common.
I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that.
To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this.
E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.
Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
My favourite feature is userChrome. The default chrome sucks in both Chrome and Firefox, but at least Firefox allows me to customize it to my liking without forking the entire browser.
On the flip side, changing keybinds in Firefox requires forking, but the defaults aren't too bad.
There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.
Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.
But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there
At this point that doesn't matter, does it? Mozilla has no teeth in which to bite with. They're not even close to. So is that really the priority?
In the meantime all these conversions accomplish is the sharpening of Google's teeth. Google not only has the capacity to bite but is actively demonstrating that they'll use their teeth.
So why the fuck do we complain about a dog with no teeth while another dog is eating our legs? Let's get our priorities right. Let's talk after we're not being bitten or if that dog starts eating our other leg.
they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that "everything is being corrupted and turning against users over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend that it represents than the feature itself. We are soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely zero, and it's not right now... and since they're ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is especially jarring. When Google does something evil every day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla does something evil you're truly disappointed because they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the good guys.
Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"
Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.
We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.
yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value which we are discovering the value of. The claim is "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy does any of the things we've seen. In every case they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.
> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?
No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.
The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote
"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."
They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.
Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.
(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)
To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.
I'm a big fan of being critical of corporations. But we're worse off by treating this as a binary condition (moral vs immoral) rather than a continuum. No company is fundamentally moral and nobody is perfect. By creating a binary distinction we end up either placing everything into the same bucket or being disillusioned to their faults. Neither is good but the former allows for a race to the bottom and the least moral one to win. That's worse for us users.
I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?
It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.
Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.
All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?
Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.
Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.
Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.
Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.
I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!
I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!
the point of taking a big moral stance against Mozilla -- in fact, against anyone is
> if not Firefox, who?
Firefox! But run well!
The point of complaining about someone fucking up, or shaming them, is to get them to stop. They're the ones who should be doing good; they're in the position to do so; they know how; their hubris/capture by money/interests/class/ignorance/something is preventing it. They need only listen to solve this problem. And maybe wholesale replace leadership, I dunno. But replacing bad leadership is way easier than writing a new browser for scratch.
(a secondary purpose of complaining is to promulgate good norms to everybody else so that everybody's on the same page about what respectable behavior would look like)
> Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation.
The problem is that others listen and use those words to justify choosing "not Firefox." It is the way we complain about Firefox, not that we do. It's a fine line to walk, but be careful to not arm your enemy
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
Then explain Brave then. They market as privacy but it has similar issues being chromium. The most critical being that by being chromium Google still gets to dictate how the internet works
> I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
I believe the vast majorty of people do not care about their privacy, answering GP's question.
I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.
Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]
They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.
Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really, including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad happening. They used to have my full location data but offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where people are. I think people sometimes people worry about the wrong stuff.
The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer over Firefox, because it was already installed on their device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.
> All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.
It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.
These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.
Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.
I don't know what you mean; uBlock Origin Lite blocks every ad on any page I visit in Safari and Chrome, even YouTube ads. Safari also blocks tracker cookies by default, and is significantly faster than Firefox in my use.
I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge side by side all the time, and I never experience any difference in page load times except on YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.
The performance is fine and has always been fine for me, across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward. No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine, either.
Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.)
I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.
But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."
Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.
What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?
I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation.
You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex
I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools.
For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.
Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
> Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity.
Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.
Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox.
It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default.
Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
> any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity
because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.
It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare.
Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations.
It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.
For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?
For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.
They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.
> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.
edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.
Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.
For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.
FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.
It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.
So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.
I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.
It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.
In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
Rust/Servo/Quantum culminated in tangible benefits that reflect successfully played out projects from which Firefox reaped major rewards. And FireFox OS, perhaps more than any other, is something I wish we had right now, because if they never gave up on it and we had a 10+ year old alternative mobile OS waiting for its moment, it could have been well positioned in a moment like this one where Android is increasingly betraying the trust of its developers. I think the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership, quickly forgotten, could have been meaningful if there was good vision.
Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had relevance, and core services like email, search and maps that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS. Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if that unfortunately amounted to nothing.
I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-....
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
> I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).
Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the other way around. We get a discussion about this every few months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it up.
I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
They really need to work on making an easier transition from Chrome if they care about converting users. Add an out of the box (preferably default) option to make the tabs look normal and not ugly like they are now. Change the private window shortcut to Cmd(Ctrl)+Shift+N like every browser has standardized on. Also I swear they override the normal text input behaviour, specifically if I'm using option+left/right arrows to jump between tokens in the URL bar, it jumps my cursor to unexpected places, like at the wrong side of periods.
Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off everything Chrome does in that department.
Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.
And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.
Are you using the Ubuntu Snap to train Firefox? If so, you can switch to the native Debian packages released directly by Mozilla. They don't do that sandboxing stuff, and they are a lot faster. I don't notice any speed difference between Chromium und Firefox even on a Raspberry Pi.
doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”?
what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.
If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know enough to put any weight behind that statement.
It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.
I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.
that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.
Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias, you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to piss off if their poll result is a unanimous "no".
So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.
Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
If you ask for feedback, and then you receive feedback, that is literally polled data: polling is the act of soliciting and then recording opinion-based data.
(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)
Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is.
If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.
yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and clicking around.
I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and in the next paragraph mention 52 responses to the announcement at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from anyone. Very different thing.
It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52 definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said no.
I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on the Mozilla Connect forum.
The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator.
Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.
Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest.
>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries
I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.
Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
If you tell this to someone who has never used LLMs/AI they may be curious. I have though. I also understand how the technology works and that you will have to read those research papers yourself anyway, verify every source, check every fact (including the ones that got omitted). Maybe it’s better than previous gen machine translation, but you better not rely on context and subtle sentiments being translated as intended all the time.
If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).
They are miles better than the ordinary machine translators. That's all that matters, because I can't afford a personal human translator to browse the web.
Human translation is obviously better, but not by much, especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human.
That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
I myself can see using that some day. I was dismissive of AI-assisted search results, now I'm back to using google search most of the time over duckduckgo, because of quality. I don't want to be forced to abandon firefox down the road. Every feature they add,from pocket,vpns, to this, is optional. Just don't use it. Let firefox get more marketshare. It's the only Google alternative.
>It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other medium or social you check.
That tells more about your socials than anything else. I personally know plenty of non-technical folks using ChatGPT (because it's the only buzzword they know) to augment their browsing in an awkward manner. They want utility, they don't give a damn about anyone's sentiments.
I'm not a techbro and I want this. I know other people who aren't techbros who want it as well. So what makes your anecdotal evidence any stronger than mine? Maybe you and the author shouldn't be speaking for everyone.
Speak for yourself, I do want to see Mozilla experimenting with new features and functionality opened up by new technology. Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be trying new things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It's new technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla should be on the forefront of figuring it out.
Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing.
Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me?
AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).
> 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so they're more likely to need it than you.
It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
> It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
Not at all, I just think going around seeing if AI fits is the same as going around with a hammer looking for nails. Let the problems lead you to a solution, don't start with "what can we solve with this?"
"You'll have computers in your home, you can look at a schedule or store recipes!" AI is being shoehorned in weird places, it's in the "kitchen recipes" stage where all we can come up with are chatbots. I think it's premature and wasteful, and will cost regular users a lot of money on wasted AI potential simply because these companies have to recoup some of their investment, even at the cost of user experience and utility.
> What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read?
In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I find that having a quick chat about a document after reading it is a good way to interrogate my own understanding of the document.
I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future. You've got to walk before you can run.
Brave user here, I use Leo way more than I thought I would for this exact reason. I ask it to summarize a large .NET documentation topic for me, or explain a coding topic while I try and learn the latest thing. It reads the page and I dont have to copy URLs or paste texts, I just click and ask.
Probably that it's a decent first step, with a well defined feature set and user expectations, so a nice thing to try before they figure out what to do next. And the article this comment thread is about is a reaction to one of their announcements in that regard: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/
AI overuse drives me crazy but the steelman is that new technologies often involve a cringe experimentation phase before they find their "killer apps."
E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories changed the world.
Just because we don't want Mozilla to waste precious resources developing clearly unwanted features does not mean we don't want them to experiment. This isn't experimentation. It's being a sheep.
But LLMs became possible precisely due to centralized server, their economies of scale, and their capacity to train on user data. All of which are against the core tenets of locality, privacy and low cost (gratis) of FOSS.
Sorry guys, but this one is not for you. Unless you go all in on microchips so powerful that they enable local LLMs, but even that seems to be outside of the FOSS competency as it involves hardware, which FOSS doesn't usually touch (with the exception of raspberry pi's and some libre phones)
This is precisely the sort of political demand for stagnation that I'm talking about. Doing your best to make RMS proud isn't going to make this technology go away.
Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about.
This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.
This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time:
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:
Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)
> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.
> Directory Tiles: 2014
Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.
> Pocket acquisition: 2015
Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?
> Firefox Focus: 2015
Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?
> Cliqz experiment: 2017
That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?
> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.
Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?
I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.
Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.
The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).
So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.
Same! I remember when Firefox 2 and 3 were major marketing and media events, and the subject of great excitement from users almost akin to the release of a new iPhone.
I think it's unfortunate we got away from that cadence though I'm sure it was for good reasons I don't fully appreciate.
You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.
> (1) They spend more on browser development now...
Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.
> (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...
This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
> (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).
> (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...
The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
> (5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...
You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
> (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.
You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").
I'm only going to pick out a handful of these, because otherwise the conversation would be long, but the through line in all of these is that they're not accountable to baseline factual accuracy (and yes, that matters), and they're attempting to rehabilitate malformed criticisms without taking responsibility for the criticisms in the form they've been expressed, and even the attempts at rehabilitation are flawed.
>Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy.
I know you wanted to keep this conversation outside the realm of facts, but that's hard to do when active internet users in 2009 were around 1.77 billion and are now at 5.5 billion, spending in the industry as a whole has exploded, browser complexity has grown to the point that they are effectively mini operating systems, the complexity of the ecosystem of web apis and standards and complexity of security has expanded by orders of magnitude.
Moreover, treating the change in market share like a failure is nonsense in a world where distribution is dominated by OS bundling and defaults. Firefox could double its dev budget and still lose share if Microsoft, Apple, and Google keep leaning on their platform power.
So there are so many levels on which to reject the premise of "spending more to achieve less", which I think it goes to show that measuring these criticisms against the factual record is actually extremely important.
And again, I would reiterate that you're not taking responsibility for voluminous criticisms that are more real than you seem to recognize, which quite literally do suggest that the side bets siphoned away real resources n from software development. You yourself are making a form of that argument, but characterizing it as "distraction", which conveniently can't be measured in development funds or lines of code, but hinges on subjectively judged abstractions (aka vibes) like mind share and "focus".
>This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground.
Unless you think that the dynamics driving Chrome's initial rise in market share stopped being leveraged, the significance of its platform dominance in explaining its market share is every bit true now as it was then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If anything it's only intensified. And again, this is not taking responsibility for the actual criticisms in the forms they have been expressed, which tend to make no such distinction, mention market share collapse explicitly, and omit the rise of Chrome from the story entirely.
>This is a straw man.
I promise you it's not, and if I wanted to be uncharitable I could have emphasized some truly off the charts claims people have made with every ounce of confidence and self-assurance that they spoke on behalf of the Mozilla user base, e.g. conspiratorial suggestions that the nonprofit/corporate subsidiary organization is intended to trick people, that they're manipulating their nonprofit reporting figures, completely sincere but inaccurate attempts to claim that the VPN and Pocket were substantial money sinks, conspiratorial insinuations of quid pro quo cooperation with Google's monopoly, or most amazingly, a categorical claim that Quantum was abandoned rather than finished.
Some of the criticisms, quite forcefully made here on HN, have been that Mozilla ignores feature requests, either generally, or specific ones, like tab customizations, or, in this thread, WebUSB. Everyone dies on a slightly different hill. But they all tie the issue of market share to the issue of "focus" on the browser however quantified. And if you don't think it's a matter of feature development, the logic is equally flawed if you substitute a new preferred term like "core browser". Just like there's no magic feature that restores the market share overnight, there's no such thing as a sufficient threshold of focus on the core browser that achieves that restoration of market share.
>You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism
I think that misreads the balance of emphasis in my comment. I would say my comment was a dispute of the vast majority of ventured criticisms, combined with an acknowledgment of proportionately a small few. There are needles of legitimate criticism buried a haystack of spurious nonsense. I would also suggest it's a bit of a misread in a more important sense, in that I'm attempting to demonstrate a degree of case-by-case reasonableness that contrasts with the one-dimensional nature of criticisms. Both in this thread and in my general experience and defenses of Firefox are even handed and willing to acknowledge criticisms, and that spirit of even-handedness is not reciprocated in criticisms that ever recognize their rhetorical excess. In fact I would argue in this conversation it's being abused in an attempt to leverage it into a confession of a contradiction.
That's not everything, but I think it serves as a representative encapsulation. If you want, pick out whichever point you believe is your strongest unanswered objection, and I'll hear you out, though we might be far enough into this comment tree that HN won't give me the option to reply.
I think it would have to be alternative search licenses, crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering.
There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option.
I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two.
So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying.
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.
For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.
Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.
In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).
I don't want my web browser to be a mediocre PDF reader. I want my good and perfected PDF reader to be a PDF reader. I don't want my web browser to be a Web development IDE. I want a specialised (version of) a browser with all the developer tools and one that lacks all these features is lighter, safer and simpler for browsing.
I don't want an FTP client in my web browser (I don't want one anywere lol). Firefox was extracted from Mozilla back in the days exactly because Mozilla had become a browser that was bloated and crammed full of features that were unpolished or just subpar.
Firefox saved Mozilla and fought back by being lean, fast, and terribly focused at doing one thing and doing talhat well.
I want a browser that's good and forever improving in letting me browse the web and run and use web-apps.
> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.
Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.
A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.
> For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything platform—perhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.
I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.
I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.
It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.
browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
browser.ml.chat.page set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
browser.ml.enable set to false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
extensions.ml.enabled set to false
That should do it.
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused, AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings, like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting protection that many sites don't play nice with.
You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
Firefox IS a high performance browser that is nice to use. It has much more tab management features than chrome and the speed is indistinguishable!
I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.
I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
Is it really that big of a task? More so than maintaining custom spellcheck dictionaries in every supported language? Even if they only implemented OS spellcheck compatibility on MacOS and Windows and just used the existing custom spellcheck on other OSes, that'd still be a huge improvement and they'd only have to do the work for two OSes rather than every OS that Firefox supports.
They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and text reader modes.
There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
That was also my story and I abandoned containers that time. But it turns out to be more about bad default UI.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.
I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in a minority.
* I summarize articles.
* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.
* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.
* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.
* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.
Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.
Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.
The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.
As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.
And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.
> The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu.
It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
When companies add additional features to a product I use, I generally want to be notified about them so that I can make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled or disabled.
If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)
But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.
It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.
Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.
Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel). It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+ until relatively recently.
It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.
I have used WebUSB exactly once: to use the GrapheneOS webinstaller. I keep a copy of Chromium around and use it about once a year for some kind of nonsense along these lines.
I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.
After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it
They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the v3 manifest limitations.
I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally client side but at the very least I need to understand what is sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent when I actively trigger the feature).
In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.
But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.
I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
I love having built-in local natural language translation implemented by AI, which Firefox provides. Local models have different properties than remote properties, and natural language translation is a useful thing. AI should be added when it solves a real need, and the risks can be minimized (or at least controlled). The goal shouldn't be to use AI, the goal should be to solve problems for humans.
People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.
Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.
> People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.
Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in expanding the scope without saying as much.
Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...
The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)
So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.
The reason I don't want AI integrated into my browser (or really anything else) is that the mental model for big tech moved from "providing value" to "capturing value" about 15 years ago, and I expect they will try to use this integration in an attempt to build a layer between the customer and all downstream services (stores, banks, information) so they can extract some form of tax on every transaction (ads, micro-fees), all while consolidating data about me to create new sources of revenue. I am one of those 'bright minds' who has wasted their talent improving marketing conversion by 0.001% instead of working to cure cancer. (Let's be honest, improvements are way better than 0.001%, I am good at my job).
I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.
- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,
- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,
- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),
- and the weights and training code are open,
I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.
As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any issues with that.
E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?
I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.
If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.
Yeah, I just gave an example elsewhere of turning a Notion page into a JSON object, that Claude Code trivially did with Playwright, but that'd be far nicer if I could just click a button to talk about the current page. I'd be happy for it to be sandboxed, as long as it's easily accessible.
Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a lot of people's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it, and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would be a gamechanger.
There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the masses.
What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.
I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.
I go back to pre-Firefox Mozilla browsers. What I want is faster, less bloat and far better memory management - a corrorlary is probably 'fix all outstanding bugs'. Were it me, I'd put a moratorium of three years on adding anything new, AI in particular.
As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M
Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.
So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.
Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas, and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome and their search engine.
I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.
I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.
Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.
Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.
Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".
Only reason Firefox has 2% market share is that Mozilla's leaders keep listening to a tiny, loud minority of extremely online luddites instead of delivering actual users what they want. The anti-AI set on HN is the same set that claims users want feature phones, not smartphones. They'd probably also be against long-distance telephone lines and the wheel.
I mean, who were they listening to when they acquired Pocket and integrated it into Firefox? Or decided to build their own video chat service? Or an encrypted file sharing service? Or Persona, Firefox OS, Firefox Hello, etc etc. These weren't just bad decisions in retrospect, these were clearly bad decisions at the time.
It kills me that they leave out features desired by more or less everybody (like ad-block), while they add completely superfluous features like AI and Pocket to the core of Firefox.
It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.
Wrong, Google wants it very much. Otherwise there would be a usable, well-maintained web browser without AI on the market and everyone would just use it
What is most upsetting is that they just offered access to the large commercial AI providers and no clear way to have a self-hosted or alternative option. THIS is where they lost their way. They must be profiting or partnering, no longer serving the community.
Mozilla spending their limited resources on something so absurd and irrelevant seems extremely strange.
People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.
Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.
To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.
I think the option to disable the context menu item is right in said context menu. Best place to put the option honestly, I wish all AI features had a disable button right next to them.
Even if LLMs seem to have reached their limits, and are no longer on the feature path towards AGI, I have a fundamental (possibly irrational) dislike for anything labeled AI, just in case this does become a stepping stone towards AGI.
On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation.
In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced advertising or digital currency for that matter.
"We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow."
You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.
I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I have questions.
My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)
> Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it utterly useless.
Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case Mistral).
The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu) hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for gpt, copilot, mistral or even claude and the sidebar just gives an error) but even if they did: what problem do these extra buttons and integrations solve? Am I missing something?
Do note that I would love integration the other way around: to have an AI agent (through an MCP for example) drive my firefox. Safely, contained, etc etc. I am not an AI luddite. I just find the firefox sidebar offering no value at all.
And I think Firefox should step up and become a better alternative to playwright. One geared at developers with tools like profiling, dom-manipulation (basically the Developer Console) assertions, visual comparison etc.
Or (and?) one geared towards normal browsing and interacting with webapps.
I googled* it and dod the same. But that merely moves the problem forward. Now the API returns errors that it's too large.
A smarter client would use a tool chain in which the first step is a model that's good at taking large contexts/data and extracting actual content from it. Many sites have a very low S/N ratio (readable content / dom).
Then pass that content, eg markdown, along to a model that's optimized at getting relevant parts out of content for the task at hand.
And only then onto the generic model to "do stuff" with it.
But many clients, including afaiks the Firefox one, just send the entire dom or html along to a generic model.
I already do this via docker desktop MCPs in which I run a.o. Playwright¹.
Zed and VS code can now drive a browser. E.g. to perform tasks like "run the site on a local server and verify that you see the counter increase when you click this new plus-button"
I thought the AI pane was convenient. Then I wanted to try a different AI service, and couldn't do so without losing all the content in the currently open pane. And I realized - this would be so much better if it was just a regular tab. Like we already have.
I do. It's nice to have when you want it and ready to not use if you don't. The more options the better. It's also nice when it's built in so you don't have to take extra steps to use it when you want to use it.
Most of the loudest critics - and, I’ve found, many commenters on HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology users. To think that nobody wants these features isn’t based on what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more “I don’t like AI and everyone else should agree” rather than “the data shows that nobody likes AI”.
Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).
Had to scroll way too far to find a comment like this. Unfortunately HN famously doesn’t understand what the average consumer wants. The Dropbox comment comes to mind.
I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in tech.
I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here.
Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and then turning out to be wrong?
Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by Dropbox, the band.
The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.
This is going to be disliked, but it's my opinion:
I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.
I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when needed.
I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any company that creates a free tool to keep users in their ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?
So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly attached to the old ways.
To create an AI that people will want to use, we need people to use it so we get better data, improve it, and learn how to control models. It’s a catch-22. I definitely don’t want AI tabs in Firefox but I can see why all this might be necessary because of massive potential for a superintelligence to solve problems or open new doors we didn’t know existed. But then we have to ask ourselves if these new pathways for humanity are so far removed from what humans can accomplish on their own, is there pride in a new revolution akin to the human derived pride in what we have accomplished on our own for the Industrial Revolution, for example, or even just petrol or nuclear power discovery?
Allow me to be a devil's advocate here. I don't natively like AI in Firefox. But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.
Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.
Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.
Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.
The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.
“But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.”
Dear god, no. The last thing I want to be doing is telling grandma over the phone how to sweet-talk the settings screen into turning her adblocker back on.
Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.
Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.
The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.
Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.
So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.
Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
And now Firefox.
Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
>What strikes me as odd is the decision to position itself as just another AI‑enabled web browser, picking a fight with big techs and better‑funded startups whose users are less hostile (and sometimes enthusiastic) about adding AI to web browsing.
By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.
These tabs will probably be similar to the tabs in browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity. And some people really do use these browsers.
Perhaps this is Mozilla's chance to monetize. Give at least some users the opportunity to use this feature and pay Mozilla.
AI or not, feels like the focus in the past few years for the browser has been to do catch-up on the trendy feature rather than improving the core experiences.
TBF some of these features are also unique and something i cherish when browsing the web (e.g. container tabs). however, the devs must ask why every "new" browser is just a chromium fork in the end.
there should be a try to pivot to the core experience than feature parity to see if it actually brings more people over.
Google has an "AI Overview" whenever you search for something, and this is probably what Mozilla wants to enable. I think your average person will find it useful.
Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.
If they did things right, it shouldn't matter. Default Firefox should be nothing but a browser, everything else should be an extension. And Mozilla should be beholden to the same restrictions every other extension developer is.
People want a lot of stuff in Firefox. However, people also seem to neatly bin all features into either "obviously necessary part of a web browser" and "obviously extraneous nonsense" when what they really mean is "things I personally want" and "things I personally don't want".
If I could get Firefox to perform searches on my behalf via the AI sidebar that would be amazing! Are you kidding me? YES I WANT THIS!
Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension—where I can pick which AI I'm using—then I'm all for it. I'll just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.
NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper grammar-checking AI too. That would be super useful. I'd love that!
Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.
I think it could be nice in the longer term, as AI gets better. Especially if it's local.
No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual websites, then we would actually be able to use the public internet.
It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though, but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a browser engine.
Personally I don't mind if the purpose is increased privacy and that the processing is done locally.
Some great examples are the local translation engine and I believe they also added or are in the process to add a small engine that can describe images and provide caption on-demand, which is a great step towards accessibility.
I’m currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I’m using Firefox as a daily driver for the first time in a decade.
While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…
It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.
They could have saved all the Google money and built a huge non-profit foundation dedicated to making the best browser. Instead they spent it on C-suite salaries and idiotic side quests. This is the consequence.
For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be available when I need it as external loadable module (extension? plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as LibreWolf and others will remove that.
The only place I can think of where I might actually find AI useful but AI is simply not there yet is for the browser to analyze the page super quickly and remove junk - ads, analytics, cookie prompts, too much extra spacing, "AI mode" buttons, the microphone button on YouTube search, YouTube Shorts and community posts etc. Basically, I should be able to tell AI to remove something and it should be able to do it instantly.
The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.
AI in an open source project will be horrible. Proprietary AI services backed by billions, hiring top programming, back/front/ui talent lead by ambitious dreamers are already problematic at most limited. A bunch of loose free lancers in their night time are not the best team to prepare a responsible and competitive AI gateway.
I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
I’d love an ai I could ask to pull up a web page I have a scattered memory of - I know what it was about but not the name of the site it was from, not if it’s open in a tab or if I closed it an hour ago, or maybe I bookmarked it. Even better if I can ask things like “can you find that movie review about some robert Downey junior film I read maybe a month ago?”
Whether it will actually do any of those things is another question of course.
I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs at all).
I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.
I also wondered about this. Mozilla pushed out some AI buttons.
I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.
I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.
The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to
companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is
the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too
by the way.
I can only speak for myself. I do not want yet more bloat added to applications. With that bloat comes more vulnerabilities, maybe intentional or otherwise. "Ooopsie did we leak your ______ to the world? Gosh, we're so sorry." Enough already, just be a web browser. Keep it simple with the only dependency being the site I am visiting.
Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of complaints.
I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.
I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.
Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.
Please make AI disappear altogether until I want it. No pop-ups, no floating "Help me..." in fields, no spinning flashing icons on toolbars. I submit feedback on all products that do this that I would like a way to turn it all off. AI is useful when I want it, otherwise it's just annoying and gets in my way.
They want to browse the internet, and really that means browse the three sites they care about. They aren't going to change their browser cause of AI capabilities, so ultimately it doesn't matter. It's like arguing over whether users want dark mode. Some do, it's not going to change market share meaningfully.
I looked at the top 25 grossing apps on iOS and Android. There is only one explicitly ai app and it’s the one that ran a Super Bowl commercial, ChatGPT. I don’t see the demand from regular consumers. When or if it grosses top in the charts then it arrived. It’s more windows 3.0 than windows 95.
If it's really hidden in its own special tab and NEVER comes out unwanted, I can see some benefits.
It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue. Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my data the product.
Meanwhile a badly behaving page doesn't just maim the tab content area but freezes the whole browser. I've been using Firefox because my Chrome install got borked so I've used that to try giving FF a real try. I feel like I regularly have to get it out of my way. Maybe fix the browser first.
I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.
HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).
The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.
I've been a Firefox user for 5 years or so and I can tell you: yes no one needs AI in Firefox especially that Firefox users tend to be on the privacy conscious side of things
But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share, and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?
Lots of people saying things like, "This is not novel; come up with new ways to use this technology!" as if that's easy.
Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!
While back I figured I should support mozilla and I signed up for their VPN. It worked for a while but it felt like a hacky ad-on ontop of mulvad and then it just wouldn't work a lot of the time and I gave up.
I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.
I couldn't disagree more. I want responsible AI and i would expect Mozilla to lead the way on how to do this when it comes to browsers (they were pioneers when it came to containers and privacy control).
Here's some ways I can think of:
- seamless integration with local models
- opt in and opt out experience when needed
- ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)
- ai and accessibility
these are off the top of my head.
it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.
I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and short sighted.
People say Mozilla should try to make Firefox better to steal back usage from Chrome and then they say stuff like "nobody want AI in Firefox". Like it or not, AI it's here and if you want your browser to reach more users some AI will be required.
At first I thought it was a bit tragic how Apple kinda fumbled AI. Now I think maybe they might have an edge if they were to be one of the only big companies not trying to push it into their products. Especially MacOS.
Based on how many of these are there now, it's obvious some people want these features. I don't know the numbers, but some people obviously do want to chat with their browser now.
Google approached this the right way. No, not with "ai mode", that sucks. With the Chrome dev tools MCP. You allow AI to control the browser if the user opts-in and sets it up.
Contrarian here. I've fell in love with Firefox's AI Chatbox sidebar. It's extremely helpful to have Gemini immediately available to help with translating and summarizing text.
Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could affect much more than just privacy.
The onus is on FireFox to deliver "the killer feature". No killer feature, nobody will bother with it. Mozilla needs to shift into entrepreneurial innovation.
if my car comes with the ability to start normally but also an alternate mode where, by deisgn, it explodes and kills my entire family is that providing me with freedom of choice in my automobile experience? am I in control because I have the option to do things I would never under any circumstances actually want to do? or is someone trying to convince me that i'm in charge because I get to pick from a menu they wrote?
Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the current state of “AI” and where it’s headed, the undeniable fact is that “AI” has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has had more than a few over the years).
What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It’s not easy. I’d rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail instead of just being left behind due to inaction.
i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely different UI after all this time.
Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any of Firefox's AI code or functionality.
Serious question: to what end? I'm pretty adept at skimming text and honing in on things of interest. I have also spent years in academic and professional environments developing those skills, so I genuinely may not understand some common use cases.
I can see this if you're looking over something and don't know what it is. Highlight it and right-click or whatever and ask the AI to give you a quick summary. Similar to how wikipedia links will show enough in the preview to get an idea what it might be.
In a typical corporate environment, you cannot assume the recipient of an email will read past the first sentence, maybe not even the subject line. A vast number of people simply do not read. They can but they don’t.
Lots of commenters replying with 'actually some people want this', or 'actually I want this'.
Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that when mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI integration in the browser. That at least indicates that the people who are actively following firefox development are substantially against this kind of feature. It's not just "I and the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important subset of firefox power users don't want it.
In other words, the people that are actively going out of their way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based on having access to such things... to which I say... really??? But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who will choose firefox over whatever corporate-captured competitor is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.
Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some other commenters, is that, whether or not people do want this, they shouldn't want it. It is bad for users and for the world to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.
Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating research sessions, by searching and organizing...
I want it, but I have ideas in mind that aren’t just a chat window bolted to a browser.
Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.
We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.
I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it need to do AI?
Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.
I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.
I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory when I absolutely don't want it).
Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.
I meant what were they expecting? A bunch of their privacy-wonk userbase to go "Oh shit; I'm finally gonna go all-in on the slop now that Mozilla's doing AI?"
Like, what were they thinking?
I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.
A more cynical take/question: is Mozilla just pursuing these initiatives because their corporate sponsors need to push AI everywhere they can to justify their burn, in the hopes that a profitable use case eventually arises with a sufficient user base accustomed to the technology to pay for it?
I would prefer that contenteditable divs with multi-line contents would handle newlines in a consistent manner instead of the chaotic mess we have now. But I guess that doesn't pump stock valuations so AI slop it is.
I think they're damned if they do ("who the fuck wants AI in everything") and damned if they don't ("Mozilla is so irrelevant they didn't even tried the AI race")
It's a browser. A browser does not need AI baked in. Extensions/addons? Sure, go for it, the more the merrier. But forcing it on people was always going to be a daft move, especially for Mozilla who have completely lost their whole "We're not as bad as Google" schtick over the last few years.
I don't want AI anywhere, but it seems I cannot open any of my familiar applications without having to stumble over their new, stupid "AI" button. It has become quite infuriating.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure I want AI in my browser, whatever that may mean, but I don't think everyone shares my view. To think otherwise is IMHO delusional.
> We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and more profitable for us because we can sell your data!
I think the underlying motivation here is that employees at Mozilla want to deliver big projects to get promoted / recognized / advance their careers. The fundamental "cause" for the misanthropic behavior is a perverse incentive structure. In my head I associate it with the "OKR" framework: when you're evaluated on "delivering recognizable projects" (regardless of value; it benefits everybody to pretend they have value) instead of "doing your job well" (whatever it is, whether glamorous or not) then you end up with bizarre corporate behaviors like this.
It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if they can invent recognizable deliverables, because the whole chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting / hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from everyone else also pretending.
But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even likes it.
None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so much free money going around. If you have to do an actually good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment, you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress the board/executives/big donors.
The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.
(Probably there are a few other things driving this framework also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as clueless about what makes software good for the users as everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have to to keep their jobs.)
This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS. But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh. And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it and for some reason that works because for mysterious and probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that either.
Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so disappointing.
there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?
Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default.
I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?
true, but that's not the same as "nobody wants AI"; them fucking it up once shouldn't mean that they should drop the entire idea; by this logic they should stop making browsers altogether
the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu
> local translation is already available
and it's already "AI"
> I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping ...
they already have a "suggest more tabs" thing that does exactly this using a local model; it's insanely slow, low quality, doesn't use gpu, but the idea is nice. I'm hoping they will continue working on it, as managing tabs across multiple windows is not exactly what I want to spend my time on, and it's exactly the type of a problem LLMs are perfect for
> never had issues with ads
it could always be better; there's always a certain amount of sites that either don't work at all or still show ads, and I imagine you could use a local VLM to hide elements based on the actual rendered result; same with cookie banners, annoying sign-in prompts, and so on -- how is this not the coolest thing ever? as long as you have like 8gb (v/u)ram, you could immediately unshittify most of the web
AI is unfortunately an umbrella term which people can project what they want on to. For reasonable people like yourself it's a tool to accomplish tasks. While for someone else it might be CoPilot showing up frequently and they don't disable or turn off the notifications and just get continually frustrated.
so why not give mozilla the benefit of the doubt? why assume that it's necessarily gonna be a slopfest? I'm not exactly optimistic, but it could be good, I do want those features, and I'm not gonna switch to something like chrome
I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like response. I tire of all these interfaces.
What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead, you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly LLM agents).
eventually, but that's going to take a decade at this rate... no one has a voice assistant that can actually do anything worthwhile beyond than flip some light switches
right now we could get a browser that understands what's on the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user experience
I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd rather AI handle it
society has clearly moved on beyond "pay a person to do it" so if I can talk to something that can understand language well enough to do tasks on my behalf that's what I have to take
I do all the time, I went to a restaurant the other day and had to ask for a physical menu instead of using an app.
I can't get pizza delivered without using an app.
When I go to a pharmacy, a person tells me to get my meds by putting my information into an app they used to replace the person at the register.
When I go get coffee, my order is in the mix with a dozen people who ordered via an app... I can't get priority despite being literally right there waiting.
We've apparently given up on hiring people for various tasks, so at least give me an app that understands what I ask it instead of funneling me through some "user experience" that differs for every single thing I do.
Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves" in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self.
If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers. In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.
Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing to use their browser if you can avoid it.
Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.
Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.
I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.
Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.
[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.
This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.
You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).
Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.
So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.
Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
Everyone wants to complain about the "bloat" in Windows and macOS (and fair enough, there is a lot of bloat and cruft) but blame it all on capitalism, when Linux has kept apace in growth rate the whole time. My Linux installs have been 'round about 50% the size of my Windows installs these last 15 years, never really straying far. If we ask ourselves, "Why does Linux need to keep growing?", I think we can easily see that OS churn and growth is not just "shareholder value gotta go up."
Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden nonsensical moves.
iOS 6 was peak smartphone and I will die on that hill
> Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.
And this is why the subscription model just doesn’t make sense for most businesses. I pay for a newspaper subscription because there is literally a brand new newspaper each day. A magazine subscription yields an entirely new set of articles every month. I pay for subscription access to data that is continuously updated. The subscription model makes sense for a product that is created anew on a regular basis. It doesn’t make sense for most software companies that are producing static software. What they are calling ‘subscriptions’ are really just rentals for their static products that get minimal surface changes to justify the ongoing rent charge. I’d much rather just pay a flat fee for the static software and upgrade it when I’m ready for the new features.
Honestly it’s the first iOS I like less than the last. A lot I’d consider neutral.
But now I’ve got several bugs (and I’m on last years flagship), liquid glass is ugly until you change a guy of settings, and I find myself accidentally triggering something (usually Siri) and being annoyed more.
Bell icon in corner. Colored dot on bell. No need to overthink the UX on this beyond what color to make the dot.
Can I dismiss that distracting little pip without having to click through a tutorial for every new feature? Can I just turn this off?
This is especially irritating when, say, you set up a new phone and the app treats you as if you've never used it before.
It’s funny because lately I’ve been playing Arknights which is a gatcha game which is unusually good for free players. It has a few icons that light up with one of those dots when you have something to attend to (say you got a token to upgrade a character) but there is the dark pattern that that dot is always set on the cash store which means it is always set on the “stores” section which has substores for in-game currencies some of which you have to attend to periodically. So I see the dark pattern there.
Really my complaint is anything that covers up content; if instead of popping up a popover Firefox just took 75px above or below the page to show me something I’d complain about lot less — but if I had my way anything unwanted that covers unwanted content should bust down the whole c-suite to working in an Amazon warehouse. (I could trust those folks to deliver stuff with an e-bike but don’t want anybody with bad judgement like that driving a car or truck!)
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda
All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
1. AI is generating a lot of buzz
2. AI could be the next technology revolution
3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor
4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind
5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment
6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature
7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically
Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP.
So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
It’s also worth noting that non AI investment has basically dried up, so anyone wanting that initial investment needs to use the buzzwords.
In the 90s I did a lot of AI research but we weren't allowed to call it AI because if you used that label your funding would instantly be cancelled. After this bubble pops we'll no doubt return to that situation. Sigh.
Conversely, if you're doing any mathematical research nowdays, you better find some AI angle to your work if you want to get funding.
Great breakdown. I'm starting to think I'd pay to disable AI in most products.
Similar to how I read about a bar in the UK that has an intentional Faraday cage to encourage people to interact with people in the real world.
This sounds great actually. It seems like a fantastic revenue opportunity. We can add mandatory AI to all our products. We can then offer a basic plan that removes AI from most products, except in-demand ones. To remove it their you'll need the premium plan. There's a discount for annual subscription. You can also get the "Friends and Family" plan that covers 12 devices, but is region locked. If you go too far from your domicile, the AI comes back. This helps keep user indoors, streaming, and watching ads. Business plans will have the option to disable AI if their annual bill exceeds a certain amount. We can align this amount such that encourages typical business accounts to grow by a modest percent each year. We'll do this by setting the amount low enough that businesses are incentived to purchase but also high enough that they windup buying significant services from us. This potentially allows us to sell them services they don't need or that don't even exist, as the demand for AI free products is projected to rise in a 2-10 year timeframe.
> where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
That's the core issue. No one wants to fail early or fail fast anymore. It's "lets stick to our guns and push this thing hard and far until it actually starts working for us."
Sometimes the time just isn't right for a particular technology. You put it out there, try for a little bit, and if it fails, it fails. Move on.
You don't keep investing in your failure while telling your users "You think you don't want this, but trust us, you actually do."
[dead]
> The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Salesforce and Adobe want to advance an agenda other than selling product and giving their C-suite nice bonuses.
I think you can explain a lot of this as:
1. Executives (CEOs, CTOs, VPs, whatever) got convinced that AI is the new growth thing
2. AI costs a _lot_ of money relative to most product enhancements, so there's an inherent need to justify that expense.
3. All of the unwanted and pushy features are a way of creating metrics that justify the expense of AI for the C-suite.
4. It takes time for users to effectively say "We didn't want this," and in the meantime a whole host of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers have gotten promoted and/or better gigs because they could say "we added AI" to their product.
There's also a herd effect among competing products that tends to make these things go in waves.
I think the real takeaway here is that Jensen Huang was smart enough to found a technology company that developed innovative products with real consumer demand. He's also smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall regarding consumer market demand saturation for high-margin products. No matter what happens with AI, Huang will be recorded as having executed the greatest pivot of all time in terms of company direction.
I think you're mostly saying the same thing he is, just from a different viewpoint. It's still manglement trying to make their decisions look right.
I think in the case of in-app tooltips, the cause is much more banal: it's UX managers having to defend their team and budget with usage metrics, and so they all try to shove their new features in your face to inflate their numbers.
If we didn't have pervasive telemetry, we also wouldn't have these obnoxious nudges; UX teams would get their feedback from QA testing and focus groups, and leave the end users in peace.
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
I'll bear that in mind the next time I'm getting a haircut. How do you think Bob's Barbers is going to achieve all of that?
Bob the Barber ain't doin shit but that's mostly because he's got a room temperature IQ and is already struggling with taxes and biz-dev. he can do a mean fade, tho.
some weeks if its slow he may struggle to make his rent for his apartment; he doesn't have time or capacity to engage in serious rent-seeking behavior.
but hair cut chains like Supercuts are absolutely engaging in shady behavior all the time, like games with how solons rent chairs or employing questionably legal trafficked workers.
and FYI turns out that Supercuts a wholly owned subsidiary of the Regis Corporation, who absolutely acquires other companies and plays all sorts of shady corporate games, including branching into other markets and monopoly efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_Corporation
I would subscribe to your newsletter ;-)
It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true. For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on corporate monopolies and power in the US).
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about
> The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago.
> Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-o... (Food consolidation)
https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-cont... (Media consolidation)
https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilitie... (US electric utilities)
https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture consolidation)
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)
That geographic concentration is a real thing.
I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI every frickin' day and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate. [2]
I'd really like to see Mozilla move anywhere but the bay area, whether that is Dublin or Denver. When you aren't hanging out with "big tech" people at lunch and after work and when you have to get in a frickin' airplane to meet with those people you might start to "think different" and get some empathy for users and produce a better product and be a viable business as opposed to another out-of-touch and unaccountable NGO.
[1] Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma that companies like Kodak and Xerox die because they are focused on the needs of their current customers who could care less about the new shiny that can't satisfy their needs now but will be superior in say 15 years. Now we have The FOMO Dilemma which is best illustrated by Windows 8 which went in a bold direction (tabletization) that users were completely indifferent to: firms now introduce things that their existing customers hate because they read The Innovator's Dilemma and don't want to wind up like Xerox.
[2] we use Firefox because we hate that corporate garbage.
My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub, with some component of their funding coming from the EU, where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.
It's not a popular opinion but if I was the EU I would do the following:
(1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip something bad in)
(2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly revenue"
(3) same for having a cookie banner
#1 seems the most likely to happen (but I like the others).
Seems like maybe forking it in an agreeable way, and funding an EU crew to do the needful with the goal of upstreaming as much as possible.
I don't have insight into EU investments but that would provide a lot of bang for their euros.
Europe had a potential Mozilla: Opera. They let it flounder and Chinese investors bought it.
I liked the original Opera—it’s been a while, but I think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, long time ago—but I’m not sure they were ever a “potential Mozilla,” at least in the way I would interpret that. They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by a for-profit company.
(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)
What stops the EU from doing that now?
Regulation.
Wrong. They are actually doing it, with NLNet and NGI (Next Generation Internet) but they chose to funs Servo not Firefox.
The statement, more refined, would clarify, "publicly traded companies".
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.
But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.
> according to free market theory
Not once in the history of tech “the free market” has succeeded in preventing big corps or investors with lots of money from doing something they want.
I'm actually leaning towards the above comment being satire, it's hard to believe anyone on HN could believe in a free market in 2025.
This is yet again confusing a free market with an unregulated one. A free market is a market, where all costs are included (no external costs), so that market participants can make free decisions that will lead to the best outcome. To price in all external costs, regulation is needed.
Sure, if the common denominator user is at least as savvy as the entire marketing and strategy departments of these trillion dollar companies, then sure, users will identify products that are not designed according to their best interests and will then perfectly coordinate their purchases so that such products fail in the marketplace. Sure.
One of the problems with that idea is that sometimes it will be far more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they want and because eventually making the most amount of money possible becomes the only thing that matters to a company, what users want gets ignored and users are forced to settle for whats available.
Maybe in the long term, but not necessarily in the short term.
I just finished listening to the first episode of "Acquired" on Google and it ended with Google pushing Google Plus into everything in an effort to compete with Facebook in social networking. It really hampered all their other offerings.
https://www.acquired.fm Acquired podcast does long (2 4-hour episodes on Google) episodes on various companies, mostly tech but recently Trader Joe's
The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.
Google Wave... what an amazing piece of work just thrown in the trash.
I never used any of its collaboration features, just looked at them. I did use it as a friendly-for-non-geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST. And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was cheap and light and worked).
The reason Google Wave failed so spectacularly was that Google's Marketing team insisted on copying the "invite only rollout" that was so successful for Google Mail.
The thing is that a Google Mail early invitee could collaborate with everybody else via the pre-existing standard of SMTP email. They felt special because they got a new web UI, told their friends about it, generated hype, which then made the invites feel even more special, etc...
Google Wave had no existing standard to leverage, making it 100.00% useless if you couldn't invite EVERYBODY you needed to collaborate with. But you couldn't! You weren't allowed! They had to wait for an invite. Days? Weeks? Months? Years!? Who knows!
There was a snowball's chance in hell that this marketing approach could possibly work for a collaboration tool like Google Wave, but Google knew better. They knew better than every journalist that pointed this obvious flaw out. They knew better than every blog post, Slashdot commenter, etc...
It was one of the most spectacular failures caused by self-important hubris that I've ever seen in any industry.
Huh? You sure didn’t need an invite for Wave when I was using it.
https://creately.com/blog/customer/10-free-google-wave-invit...
https://www.newschoolers.com/news/read/Got-Google-Wave-Invit...
https://bolesblogs.com/2009/10/13/get-your-google-wave-invit...
https://googlewaveinvites.weebly.com/
And so on: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+wave%22+%22invites...
I’m not saying you are lying. Just saying that it did have a run - several years - where an invite was unnecessary.
It lost its "momentum" by then. The marketing got "early adopters" excited, the kind that would evangelise a platform, but they were blocked because either they couldn't get in themselves, or couldn't invite their colleagues. By the time Google realised their mistake and provided access to everyone without an invite, it was far too late.
They had a briefer invite only period than gmail. But definitely had one.
Google Wave didn't just go away, it became Google Docs.
Nope! Docs was an acquisition. Google Wave became Apache Wave, where software goes to die.
Sorry, I didn't mean it actually got renamed, just that all the collaboration junk that people did in Wave still can be done almost exactly the same in Google Docs, with the added benefit that people actually know what it is and how to use it.
Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it.
Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”
It was more than just "if we build our version of Facebook." It was, "if we kill off every other social like thing we have and force people into circles, we can build our own Facebook." Google Buzz, in particular, was a fairly well done integration with Google Reader and Google Mail. I legit had discussions about articles with close friends because of it. But, alas, no. Had to die because their social was supposed to be Plus.
I'm trying to remember all of the crap integrations with the likes of Youtube that were pushed. Just, screw that stuff. And quit trying to make yet another new messenger app!
I don't see Google Plus as hubris. I just think they saw a threat in Facebook and felt they had to try and build a competing product (and happened to have the time/money to invest).
Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've been hubris.
My read on the whole Google Plus thing was that they drastically underestimated the difficulty of convincing people to actually use it. They clearly had the expertise to build it, and they had some interesting ideas with their circles of friends or whatever they called them (though I think they missed the mark on how they used them). But they couldn’t convince anyone to actually use it.
Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so. So many of the choices they made were needlessly user hostile (e.g. real name requirements) that it seems like they assumed it would be a given that people would want to use it. When they later realized their error they tried to cram it down everyone’s throats with stuff like YouTube comments only working from Google Plus accounts.
> Maybe I’m wrong and internally they knew they had a major uphill battle, but I don’t think so.
I think you're wrong with probably the same confidence you think you're not wrong. :)
At most, I'd say they didn't expect it to be as hard as it proved to be.
I totally agree that Google just didn't get it right, but all the things you describe, to me, fall under a mix of "they had to try", and "it was working for Facebook" (but also having to differentiate from Facebook at the same time, eg with circles).
(Disclaimer, I guess) I was working for Facebook when the whole Google Plus thing happened, and Facebook definitely saw it as a serious threat. I don't at all recall Facebook folks laughing it off as Google hubris, more like it was a long shot, but Google wasn't to be ignored.
Upvote for you regardless, because I think it's a solid take and an engaging comment.
I think I could pretty easily have been persuaded by Google Plus. At that time I had broadly positive sentiments towards Google. Two things put me off.
Firstly, that whole account-unification thing where YouTube accounts were getting merged with Google[+] logins. That rubbed me the wrong way.
Then the Google+ promotional stuff all talked about how you could use "Circles" to silo posts to different "circles" of friends. It sounded very complicated and I was worried that I'd publish something snarky to the wrong group of friends :)
I wonder how many others had the same concern? Given that Steve Yegge accidentally published one of his rants to the public that was meant purely for internal Google consumption (I think that was on G+ ...?) that might have been a legit thing to be wary of.
There was also the very minor annoyance of G+ taking over the + operator in Google search (previously you could say +keyword instead of "keyword" to force literal search), but I don't think that would have swayed me against joining.
All that is true, but the primary problem with Google Plus was the network effect. Whenever I logged into Google plus, most of the content from friends was basically “cool, so this is Google plus” and nothing else, because everything at the time was on Facebook. Later Google started filling my feed with stuff from strangers because there was no organic content from people I actually cared about.
If you can’t solve the chicken and egg problem of engagement then nothing else really matters.
I'd probably have signed up if it were not for those two issues. Step zero in breaking the network effect is not to piss off those who might join despite it.
Google Plus launched between the time I interviewed at Google and the time I started work there, and that really took the shine off the whole thing.
Google Plus was insanely disastrous. And there was a guy, generally well respected, who was in charge of search I think? who went around advocating for Google Plus on forums, and people responding: if one needs Google Plus to find things, doesn't that mean that search is bad? But he didn't seem to make the connection, or he pretended not to.
Do they talk about Trader Joe’s illegal union busting and attempts to get the national labor relations board disbanded ?
You could probably ask an LLM to listen and answer this question
That's where I'm at with these.
I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
That, and the inordinate amount of effort being devoted to it. It's just hilarious at this point that Microsoft, for example, is moving heaven and earth to put AI into everything office, and yet Excel still automatically converts random things into dates (the "ability" to turn it off they added a few years ago only works half the time, and only affects csv imports) with no ability to disable it.
I think a lot of the pushiness is a frantic effort to keep the bubble inflated and keep the market out of the trough of disillusionment. It won't work. The trough of disillusionment is inevitable. There is no jumping straight from peak of inflated expectations straight to the slope of enlightenment, because the market fundamentally needs the cleansing action of the trough of disillusionment to shake out the theoreticals and the maybes and get to what actually works.
Hopefully after the pop rather than shoving it in our face they can return to advertising at us to use the things, and the things needing to prove themselves to get to real sales, rather than corporations getting 10% stock pumps in a day based on statistics about how "used" their AI stuff is while they don't tell the market how few people actually chose to use their AI stuff rather than just becoming a metric when it was pushed on them.
>I don't personally care if a product includes AI, it's the pushiness of it that's annoying.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice these two are currently inextricable; if there's AI in the product, then it will be pushed / impossible to turn off / take resources away from actual product improvement.
AI in everything does make shareholders happy while fixing bugs in Excel does not.
Exactly! I honestly can't remember the last time my window start menu search bar functioned as it's supposed to. For multiple laptops across more than 5 years i have to hit the windows key three to 7 times to get it to let me type into it. It either doesn't open, doesn't show anything, or doesn't let me type into it.
I mean, c'mon, its literally called the fucking windows key and it doesn't work. As per standard Microsoft it's a feature that worked perfectly on all versions before cortana (their last "ai assistant" type push), i wonder what new core functionalities of their product they're going to fuck up and never fix.
I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade, really stuck with it through WSL's development... But the first time I saw internet ads on my start menu search result was kind of it for me, I switched my default boot to Linux and really haven't looked back. I don't really need Windows for my workflows, and though I'm using Windows for my current job, I'm at a point I'd rather not be.
Windows as an OS really kind of peaked around Windows 7 IMO... though I do like the previews on the taskbar, that's about the only advancement since that I appreciate at all... besides WSL2(g) that is. I used to joke that Windows was my favorite Linux distro, now I just don't want it near me. Even my SO would rather be off of it.
It's quite the tale of poor decisions isn't it?
Microsoft could have made Windows privacy respecting, continued investing in WSL, baked PowerToys into the OS, etc. and actually made one hell of a workhorse operating system that could rival the mac for developer mindshare. They could partner with Google and/or Samsung and make some deep Android integration to rival Apple's ecosystem of products. Make Windows+Android just as seamless and convenient as mac + iOS.
Instead they opted for forced online accounts, invasive telemetry, and ads in the OS instead of actually trying to keep and win over the very enthusiasts that help ensure their product gets chosen in the enterprise world where they make their cash.
Now they're going to scrap the concept of Windows as something you interact with directly all together and make it "Agentic" whatever the hell that means.
I don't think their bet is going to pay off, especially if the bubble crashes. I think it will be one of the biggest blunders and mistakes that Microsoft will have made.
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options.
Just to push their annoying google assistant
What are you guys talking about? I have a Pixel 8, didn't install Lineage OS on it, and my power button works fine?
Some phones with the lastest android, when you press the power button instead of showing you the power options, it opens google assistant.
Apple did the same shit, long press of the power button opens up Siri.
I know I used to have a phone that didn't do this and I used to make fun of my friends¡Phone because it would do this, then I got a new phone (android) and it did. Karma I guess, can you also disable it on ¡Phone?
My annoyance with Samsung's dedicated Bixby button factored into my switch to Pixel. The long-press highjack was disappointing.
On my samsung i did find a setting to restore the off button being able to shut off the telephone.
I can only hope they won't change it back at the next update (already happened once).
I help people that use a low-code platform at work, and their editor have a right-bar tab where one can prompt an AI, send the selected code there, or send the entire code on screen.
Although I never saw anybody reporting it was actually useful, it's tasteful, accessible, and completely out of your way until you need it.
Hubspot has a tool for validating fields in data using regex. They have a little ai prompt that will write the regex for you. Now that is a good use for ai.
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)
You can disable AI in Google products.
E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.
Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322
And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?
Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a subscription fee?]".
Every time I open Google Photos, it does this. Every single time. It's insanely hostile.
My iPhone has a permanent red badge counter trying to get me to upgrade to iCloud. I've moved the settings icon so I don't see it normally, but it is nagging. There's other dark patterns used by Apple to try and increase their income by "asking" me to pay more.
What's even worse is that every time you sign into a google account without a phone number or home address associated with it, it screams at you to add them for sECurItY
Every time you update? How about Maps asking if you want to use advanced location every time you open it?
Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication, it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit "No"
YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in the general YouTube results... I like historical content, but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.
Depends; in the EU and selected countries that setting was always opt-in (i.e. it was never enabled for you). Elsewhere I guess the user has to periodically check their settings, or privacy policies, etc, which in practice sounds impossible.
> Important: By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
(same source as in grandparent comment).
Then no, I can't use a google product without being harassed, unless I live in a limited selection of blessed countries.
Note that these countries blessed themselves via legal steps (EU ones at least) and are not blessed by Google.
welcome to not being a passport bro for a change. Thats how mostbof the world feels when another cool thing happens, but the other way around
guess we'll see in a month
This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
This toggle _still_ doesn't turn off all the bs.
Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI to move around after the document is opened. The other day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is that I can get an ID card with an online account... not the various plan deductibles or anything useful like that.
I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want a summary instead of generating it automatically.
I prefer opt-in vs. opt-out. Opt-out is pretentious and patronizing.
I have everything disabled for my personal account. For work, when I looked into it, it had to be disabled centrally by my company.
It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example: Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old) Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail interface. ONE checkbox in the sea of gmail options?
Note that this setting (only accessible from desktop) also blocks spellcheck, a feature that absolutely does not need AI to implement
Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly.
I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better.
I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you cannot opt out of them.
this is the actually annoying part. they keep a/b testing or otherwise putting the ai feature button in the cardinal position and software uis keep turning into a constant game of dismissing the ai feature and finding where the actual menu or send button is.
ai features in the right context are truly awesome, but the engagement hacking is getting old.
Makes me miss Clippy :( at least he was pretty easy to dismiss.
The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
Clippy really is back
Someone should write a browser extension that changes AI buttons in websites to Clippy.
Maybe I'll ask Gemini to write one...
Clippy only helped with very specific products, and was compensating for really odd UI/UX design decisions.
LLM's are a product that want to data collect and get trained by a huge amount of inputs, with upvotes and downvotes to calibrate their quality of output, with the hope that they will eventually become good enough to replace the very people they trained them.
The best part is, we're conditioned to treat those products as if they are forces of nature. An inevitability that, like a tornado, is approaching us. As if they're not the byproduct of humans.
If we consider that, then we the users get the shorter end of the stick, and we only keep moving forward with it because we've been sold to the idea that whatever lies at the peak is a net positive for everyone.
That, or we just don't care about the end result. Both are bad in their own way.
Clippy was predictable, free, and didn't steal your data.
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Clippy at least was funny, not creepy.
And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)
That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used!
ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.
Microsoft has learned nothing from the Clippy [0] debacle. For that matter, neither have most website makers who constantly want to obscure a large chunk of the page with an AI chatbot that you cannot make completely go away. We really need web browsers that just quietly delete anything with a high Z-index.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
Even when I do try them I find myself let down.
I don’t know what version of Gemini they’re stuffing into Google products, but sheets, docs, and colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.
If you aren’t putting something comparable to good paid models into your product then don’t bother putting that feature out.
Once you train your users that your ai is half baked junk they’re not coming back to waste their time with it. It’s 10x as frustrating than regular product failures.
Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”
As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)
I was super mad about the help me write thing to, so I built https://owleditor.com - check it out!
> It’s the constant nagging about them.
If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.
So don't use Google products. I'm not trying to be snarky but, other than at work I suppose, it's not that hard to avoid them.
I had to filter all of the AI callouts from Clickup. They have an ai button on every gosh darn ui element. By far the worst offender I’ve seen.
Someone has a KPI to increase user engagement with AI features. The goal will be met, by any means.
"X isn't able to join, help them catch up fast" - vomits.
The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!
Clippy agrees.
> by offers to “help me write” or whatever.
It's fucking Clippy all over again
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected)
Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can tell it, but it is very high quality and correctly knows on which parts of the word to put emphasis on.
https://play.ht/ if anyone is wondering.
Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.
To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio, not text, and it can run on your mobile phone.
It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM.
[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md
It’s an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio (language?) and transcription.
Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?
Is it Transformer-based? If not then it's a different beast architecturally.
Audio models tend to be based more on convolutional layers than Transformers in my experience.
The openai/whisper repo and paper referenced by the model card seem to be saying it's transformer based.
Whisper is an encoder decoder transformer. The input is audio spectrograms, the output is text tokens. It is an improvement over old school transcription methods because it’s trained on audio transcripts, so it makes contextually plausible predictions.
Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it’s indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more important question is how these things are used in the UX. Decoders don’t have to be annoying, that is a product choice.
Whisper is a great random word generator when you use it on italian!
Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.
On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.
I'm not going to defend the youtube captions as good, but even still, I find them incredibly helpful. My hearing is fine, but my processing is rubbish, and having a visual aid to help contextualize the sound is a big help, even when they're a bit wrong.
Your point about the caption language is probably right though. It's worse with jargon or proper names, and worse with non-American English speakers. If we they don't even get right all the common accents of English, I have little hope for other languages.
Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily depends on implied rather than explicit context.
The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot." But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)
Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less about how it's structured.
Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube includes a human-provided translation as captions. Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up entirely.
I assume people talk about transcription, not translation. Translation in youtube ime is indeed horrible in all languages I have tried, but transcription in english is good enough to be useful. However, the more technical jargon a video uses, the worse transcription is (translation is totally useless in anything technical there).
Automatic transcription in English heavily depend on accent, sound quality, and how well the speaker is articulating. It will often mistake words that sound alike to make non-sensible sentences, randomly skip words, or just inserts random words for no clear reason.
It does seem to do a few clever things. For lyrics it seem to first look for existing transcribed lyrics before making their own guesses (Timing however can be quite bad when it does this). Outside of that, AI transcribed videos is like an alien who has read a book on a dead language and is transcribing based on what the book say that the word should sound like phonetically. At times that can be good enough.
(A note on sound quality. It not the perceived quality. Many low res videos has perfectly acceptable, if somewhat lossy sound quality, but the transcriber goes insane. It likes prefer 1080p videos with what I assume much higher bit-rate for the sound.)
In the times I have noticed the transcription be bad, my speech comprehension itself is even worse. So I still find it useful. It is not substitution for human created (or at least curated) subtitles by any means, but better than nothing.
Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but would love to be proven wrong.
Captions seem to have been updated sometime between 7 and 15 months ago. Here's a reddit post from 7 months ago noticing the update: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1kd9210/autocaptio...
and here's Jeff Geerling 15 months ago showing how to use Whisper to make dramatically better captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M9NOtusM8
I assume Google has finally put some of their multimodal LLM work to good use. Before that, they were embarrassingly bad.
Interesting. I wonder if people saying that they are useless base it on experiences before that and have had them turned off since.
There are projects that will run Whisper or another transcription service locally on your computer, which has great quality. For whatever reason, Google chooses not to use their highest quality transcription models on YouTube, maybe due to cost.
I use Whisper running locally for automated transcription of many hours of audio on a daily basis.
For the most part, Whisper does much better than stuff I've tried in the past like Vosk. That said, it makes a somewhat annoying error that I never really experienced with others.
When the audio is low quality for a moment, it might misinterpret a word. That's fine, any speech recognition system will do that. The problem with Whisper is that the misinterpreted word can affect the next word, or several words. It's trying to align the next bits of audio syntactically with the mistaken word.
Older systems, you'd get a nonsense word where the noise was but the rest of the transcription would be unaffected. With Whisper, you may get a series of words that completely diverges from the audio. I can look at the start of the divergence and recognize the phonetic similarity that created the initial error. The following words may not be phonetically close to the audio at all.
Try Parakeet, it's more state of the art these days. There are others too like Meta's omnilingual one.
Ah yes, one of the standard replies whenever anyone mentions a way that an AI thing fails: "You're still using [X]? Well of course, that's not state of the art, you should be using [Y]."
You don't actually state whether you believe Parakeet is susceptible to the same class of mistakes...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven't seen those issues myself in my usage, it's just a suggestion, no need to be sarcastic about it.
It's an extremely common goalpost-moving pattern on HN, and it adds little to the conversation without actually addressing how or whether the outcome would be better.
Try it, or don't. Due to the nature of generative AI, what might be an issue for me might not be an issue for you, especially if we have differing use cases, so no one can give you the answer you seek except for yourself.
I doubt that people prefer automatic capitations over human made, no more than people prefer AI subtitles. The big AI subtitle controversy going on right now in anime demonstrate well that quite a lot is lost in translation when an AI is guessing what words are most likely in a situation, compared to a human making a translation.
What people want is something that is better than nothing, and in that sense I can see how automatic captions is transformative in terms of accessibility.
For a few days now Im getting super cringe robot voice force dubbing every youtube video in Dutch. I use it without being logged in and hate it a lot.
Subtitles are good zo
ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of the oldest examples.
These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.
Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI.
I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right.
That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
> what used to be just called ML
FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does.
So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
"AI" is the only term that makes sense for end users because "AI" is the only term that is universally understood. Hackernews types tend to overlook the layman.
And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an inaccurate term because it's not. That's exactly what we are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to describing the implementation, and, honestly, what difference does it make for most people using it.
It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high level in most contexts.
Right now? John McCarthy invented the term in order to get a grant, or in other words it was a marketing buzzword from day zero. He says so himself in the lighthill debate, and then the audience breaks out into hoots and howls.
They need to show usage going up and to the right or the house of cards falls apart. So now you’re forced to use it.
I think companies should also advertise when they use JavaScript on the page. “Use this new feature —- why? Because it’s powered by JavaScript”
This is why I use the term "genAI" rather than "AI" when talking about things like LLMs, sora, etc.
Right, it should be invisible to the user. Those formerly-called-ML features are useful. They do a very specific, limited function, and "Just Work."
What I definitively don't want, yet it's what is currently happening, is a chatbot crammed into every single app and then shoved down your throat.
Nobody wants what's currently marketed as "AI" everywhere.
I mean, that is kinda exactly what I said..
But we do have to acknowledge that AI is very much turned into an all encompassing term of everything ML. It is getting harder and harder to read an article about something being done with "AI" and to know if it was a custom purpose built model to do a specific task or is it throwing data into an LLM and hoping for the best.
They are purposefully making it harder and harder to just say "No AI" by obfuscating this so we have to be very specific about what we are talking about.
For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean, and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV. I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.
> 3-6 months
Wow, you are an optimist. I do feel "it's close", but I wouldn't bet this close. But I wouldn't argue either, I don't know. Also, when it really pops, the consequences will be more disastrous than the bubble itself feels right now. It's literally hundreds of billions in circular investing. It's absurd.
I do want AI for some things but I actively go out of my way to find it, I dont want AI forced everywhere its like cryptominers you are forced into wasting compute energy resources you never asked to waste but much worse at least cryptominers are limited by your hardware, in this case you have an entire datacenter churning just until you can click “Disable” on the model.
I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks.
That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.
> before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about
Spoiler: you didn't.
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this. AI can be useful, and integration is beneficial. But if we are talking about the momentary hype, then no, most people are against stupidly blindly shoving AI into something and getting annoyed with it the whole time.
Personally, I would prefer for apps to safely open up for any kind of integration, and AI being just one automation of many, whatever one prefers. It's so annoying for everything being either a walled garden, guarding every little bit they can grab; or having apps open, but so limited in what they actually can do, that you are basically forced to the walled gardens.
> Well, if you phrase it this way, then yes, people want this.
No? If anything, adding AI features to something is just driving away your user base. No one asked for a built-in AI. Why not provide an extension?
And you know this how?
Have you seen usage statistics of AI integrations?
I personally don't like them, but I don't expect that I am a representative user. Nor are the people I know.
I believe there are good targeted tasks. One Chrome plug-in called 'Tweeks' is a reimplementation of Grease monkey user scripting where you can make changes by posing natural language to an LLM that changes the page for you. It was posted here in hn the other day. [0]
Also I believe some agentic tasking can make sense: scroll through all the Kindle unlimited books for critically acclaimed contemporary hard sci-fi.
But stapling on a chat sidebar or start page or something seems lacking in imagination.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
Slight correction: the LLM doesn't change the page for you, the LLM creates sort of a mini-extension (like GreaseMonkey) that changes the page for you. This means you only make one request to the LLM and it creates something to modify the page from that point on.
Fair enough, you are right. To me this is a good example of a tailored LLM application that actually does something you want.
I don't want imagination in my existing tools. I don't want the designers of my tools sneaking into my toolbox and fucking with shit in the middle of the night.
Like most attempts to put AI in the browser, that feels stupidly vulnerable to injection.
Definitely worth asking the devs about, they're active on HN.
In firefox yeah! I use it often.
I have it connected to a local Gemma model running in ollama and use it to quickly summarize webpages, nobody really wants to read 15 minutes worth of personal anecdotes before getting to that one paragraph that actually has relevant information, and for finding information within a page, kinda like ctrl-f on steroids.
The machine is sitting there anyway and the extra cost in electricity is buried in the hours of gaming that gpu is also used for, so i haven't noticed yet, and if you game, the graphics card is going to be obsolete long before the small amount of extra wear is obvious. YMMV if you dont already have a gaming rig laying around
An AI specifically customized to pull the recipe out of long rambling cooking blog posts would be great. I'd use that regularly.
that's not "AI" that's just a basic firefox extension, and one that's trivially easy to search for
literally googles first hit for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/jkw62b/i_developed...
Something like this I wouldn't mind, privacy focused local only models that allow you to use your own existing services. Can you give a quick pointer on how to connect Firefox to Ollama?
Docs here: https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-si...
I think its technically experiemntal, but ive been using this since day one with no issue
Use openwebui with ollama.
Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
So grab ollama and your prefered model.
Install openwebui.
Connect openwebui to ollama
Then in firwdox open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
The default AI integration doesn't seem to support this. The only thing I could find that does is called PageAssist, and it's a third-party extension. Is that what you're using?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-assist/
My mistake, I left a step out. Use openwebui with ollama. Openwebui is compatible with the firefox sidebar.
So grab ollama and your prefered model, install openwebui.
Then open about:config
And set browser.ml.chat.provider to your local openwebui instance
Google suggests the you might also need to set browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false. But i dont remember having to do that
The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another
I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".
We both know this is never going to happen on mainstream browsers, they'll just keep shoving AI into your face until you become dependent to it.
If you want a short answer: most people don't.
But a more nuanced is: the term "AI" has become almost meaningless as everything is being marketed as AI, with startups and bigger companies doing it for different reasons. However, if you mean GenAI subset, then very few people want it, in very specific products, and with certain defined functionality. What is happening now though is that everybody and their mum try to slap it everywhere and see if anything sticks (spoiler: practically nothing does).
There's a big difference between having access to AI tools and baking AI into everything by default
What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.
AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you.
However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat.
Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.
Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them.
There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence.
Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards.
Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!
Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!
More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites. The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility.
If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.
We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...
3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
Many years ago now, Mozilla hired an adtech exec to run the show and I arrived at the conclusion that Firefox would be staffed by for-profit thinkers in direct conflict with their non-profit foundation. That’s the moment I stopped donating. I daily drive Orion as even though Kagi is for profit, they have managed to keep trash out of their free version.
If you want to ask LLM about the page you're on, rather often you CANNOT just paste a link: a lot of publicly accessible documents are blocked for AI assistants. So give-LLM-access-to-the-thing-I'm-now-looking-at is quite useful.
Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that.
in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.
I love that thing specifically, copilot tab completions in vscode.
It makes my life SO much easier (less time spent on editing config files, less chance to make a silly typo whilst writing scripts).
It definitely has its place.
I agree
I like to keep AI at arms length, it's there if I want it but can fuck off otherwise
Lots of people really do seem to want it in everything though
That's fine. My gripe here is that Firefox, Google etc.. try to force this onto everyone. If I could I would just disable the crap AI as I don't need or use or want it. But we are not given an easy option here; the Google "opt-out" is garbage. I actually had to install browser extensions to eliminate that Google AI spam. That extension works better than those "Google options" given to us. I actually rarely use Firefox so I can not even want to be bothered to install an installation, but I know that I don't need any AI crap from Firefox/Mozilla either. People are no longer given a choice. The big companies and organisations abuse people. I have said since years that we, the people, need back control over the world wide web. That includes the UI.
That's what I've been saying for some time now... "No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't.
Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.
Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.
And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to.
I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer.
It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.
Yes.
I want AI in my email to speed up (and avoid typos) in replying.
I want AI in my news feed to pull the topics that are interesting to me.
I want AI in online shopping to filter and recommend products by complex conditions.
I want AI in my car to make me safer.
I want AI in my calendar to schedule with a minimum of interruptions.
I want AI in my work chats to answer questions that people have already asked me.
I want AI to make clinical diagnoses more accurate.
I want AI for a thousand things and most people do, or will.
What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.
Have you considered Raycast? I don’t use it for those features myself, but it is extensible and has a large community, so even if it can’t do those things by default, I’m sure you could configure it to.
For simple searches it really is better, as long as you don't take the answers as fact. Certain search terms (most?) cause you to be bombarded with ads. Try asking a search engine about details of a particular bond. The answer won't be on the second page.
The AI to give you sources you check if you need the answer to be right. That's still better than a google search in many cases.
Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that positive either:
Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - <https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>
The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more
Most (all?) of it runs locally too
Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.
Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.
My mom recently praised the brave AI summary of a webpage so who knows, the usage might be higher than we think.
Loads of people are Google's AI Summaries; it's the first result, so, hard to miss.
I used to hate Twitter when it first launched because I thought short form text was stupid, now I see everything will become summaries with AI and nobody will ever read anything meaningful.
It could be something of an historical return to form; a small class of properly educated people and then the wider, semi-literate masses.
I'm "properly educated" by most definitions, 95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine. Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books and movies and many other things before deciding to read or watch the entire work.
>95% of web pages are garbage and a summary is fine.
Mmm, summarized garbage.
>Also I imagine you frequently read summaries of books
This isn't what LLM summaries are being used for however. Also, I don't really do this unless you consider a movie trailer to be a summary. I certainly don't do this with books, again, unless you think any kind of commentary or review counts as a summary. I certainly would not use an LLM summary for a book or movie recommendation.
Communicating in pictographs
That should be a next step. It takes too much time to read summary. So the result should be a summary picture! Text based image generation is quite good now. How would you call this chatgpt feature?
Gotta love them emojis
If someone wanted to do this for whatever reason, there's actually a language that can be written exclusively in emojis. It's called toki pona, and while emojis aren't the standard writing system, there have been several proposals. It works well since toki pona has a very small syntax (only around ~150 words iirc)
There is plenty of text for which a good summary will have a far higher ratio of meaning to words than the original.
Did you write a comment like this last time a recipe clipper got posted here?
Imagine putting down your AI-assisted smartphone to look up at the computer screen and minimize your AI-assisted vscode, glance past the Windows-integrated Copilot AI, open up firefox and move your mouse past the built-in AI search... only to go to chatgpt.com
Good question.
I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
The AI tools can be an amazing upgrade over normal search boxes. I rarely let Claude write any code, but I get a lot of value out of pointing it at an unfamiliar repo and asking it to track down which files contain the code I’m looking for and to summarize how the pieces fit together.
There are also a lot of subtle AI tools that aren’t in-your-face LLM prompts that flatter you with “Excellent question!”. It’s great having my photo library automatically annotated so I can search for things like “moose” and it will bring up that picture of the moose we saw, rather than me having to remember what year it happened and scroll through photos until I find it.
I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement.
Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:
1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!
1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.
1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?
2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.
2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.
2020s: AI, AI, AI!
I use it for summarization constantly. I made iOS/mac shortcuts which call Gemini for various tasks and use them quite often, mostly summarization related.
How do you know its summaries are correct?
You already know that they aren't. Yesterday my wife and I were discussing Rønja Røverdatter. When we were kids it used to have danish talk over, so you could still hear the original swedish sound as well. Now it has been dubbed, and we were talking about the actor who voices Birk. Anyway, we looked him up and found out he was in Blinkende Lygter, which neither of us remebered. So we asked Gemini and it told us he played the child flashback actor of the main character... except he doesn't, and to make matters worse, Gemini said that he played Christian a young Torkil... So it even got the names wrong. Sure this isn't exactly something Gemini would know, considering Rønja Røverdatter is an old Astrid Lingren novel that was turned to film decades ago, and Blinkende Lygter is a Danish movie from 20ish years ago where Sebastian Jessen plays a tiny role. Since they are prediction engines though, they'll happily give you a wrong answer because that's what the math added up to.
I like LLM's, I've even build my own personal agent on our Enterprise GPT subscription to tune it for my professional needs, but I'd never use them to learn anything.
I've done some summarizing with my own small Tcl/Tk-based frontend that uses llama.cpp to call Mistral Small (i.e. all is done locally) and i do know that it can be off about various things.
However 99% of the times i use this isn't because i need an accurate summary but because i come across some overly long article that i do not even know if i'm interested in reading, so i have Mistral Small generate a summary to give me a ballpark of what the article is even about and then judge if i want to spend the time reading the full thing or not.
For that use case i do not care if the summary is correct, just if it is in the ballpark of what the article is all about (from the few articles i did ended up reading, the summary was in the ballpark well enough to make me think it does a good enough work). However even if it is incorrect, the worst that can happen is that i end up not reading some article i might find interesting - but that'd be what i'd do without the summary anyway since because i need to run my Tcl/Tk script, select the appropriate prompt (i have a few saved ones), copy/paste the text and then wait for the thing to run and finish, i only use it for articles i'm in already biased against reading.
It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add something to this discussion.
How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?
To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article. And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the article says from a headline.
So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are correct enough for the purpose they serve.
You can make a better decision if you have the context of the actual thing you are reading, both in terms of how it's presented (the non-textual aspects of a webpage for instance) and the language used. You can get a sense of who the intended audience might be, what their biases might be, how accurate this might be, etc. By using a summarizing tool all that is lost, you give up using your own faculties to understand and judge, and instead you put your trust in a third party which uses its own language, has its own biases, etc.
Of course, as more and more pieces of writing out there become slop, does any of this matter?
For most things it doesn't matter, as long as its usually correct enough, and "enough" is a pretty low bar for a lot of things.
Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?
> Can you give an example?
Recipe pages full of fluff.
Review pages full of fluff.
Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion.
> And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?
You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trust any human-written summary. Is this a real question?
"Get me the recipe from this page" feels like a place where I do really care that it gets it right, because in an unfamiliar recipe it doesn't take much hallucination around the ingredients to ruin the dish.
I guess I never come across that situation because I just don’t engage with sources that fluff. That is a good example, but presumably, there should be no errors there because it’s just stripping away unnecessary stuff? Although, you would have to trust the LLM doesn’t get rid of or change a key step in the process, which I still don’t feel comfortable trusting.
I was thinking more along the lines of asking an LLM for a recipe or review, rather than asking for it to restrict its result to a single web page.
Doesn't matter if they get it wrong sometimes. So does human writers.
Most recipe blogs have a "skip to recipe" button because they know you don't care.
Enough don't.
DuckDuckGo has a great tool for dealing with those ones: "Block this site from all results".
That doesn't get me their content.
Why would you reward those sites with clicks? Just go to the sites that actually respect your time.
Because I can get content I want there, and with a summarisatin option, it is irrelevant to me if they don't "respect my time" because it doesn't take any more time for me to get at the actual recipe.
Because they mostly are, and even if not, it doesn't usually matter.
For example - you summarize a YouTube link to decide if the content of it is something you're interested in watching. Even if summarizations like that are only 90% correct 90% of the times it is still really helpful, you get the info you need to make a decision to read/watch the long form content or not.
How do you know they want a correct summary? AI slop is good enough, acceptable for many people.
What is the use of such a summary?
Determining whether something is worth reading doesn't require a good summary, just one that contains enough relevant snippets to give a decent indication.
The opportunity cost of "missing out" on reading a page you're unsure enough about to want a summary of is not likely to be high, and similarly it doesn't matter much if you end up reading a few paragraphs before you realise you were misled.
There are very few tasks where we absolutely must have accurate information all the time.
What are you constantly summarizing?
Articles. Some articles I fully read, some others I just read the headline, and some others I want to spend 2 minutes reading the summary to know whether I want to read the full thing.
I want the LLM outside of the apps, telling the apps what to do on my behalf and gathering information from them privately towards doing what I ask it or answering questions I have for it.
If an app is a gateway to a bunch of data, it's cool to be able to "talk" to that data via any built-in LLM-based stuff, but typically the app is just a frontend anyway in that case, so the app isn't really needed.
I'm looking for AI features in a few places, one example is a git client that can draft commit Summary and Descriptions. This should be a very simple task and could use a simple on-device model. It feels like AI features are a firehose though. You either get none and a very 2018 product experience or a complete rework of everything "designed for agents".
Well said. I use AI often, but I don't want it "in" any other tool. It's annoying and in my experience, tools get worse the more "intelligent" they try to be. They get in your way and become unpredictable. I want silent, dumb, perfectly deterministic interfaces. And guessable, too (if that's a word?)
It's magic when it's optional.
I've vibe coded a few Godot games. It's all good fun.
But now everything is forcing it. Google is telling people what rocks are tasty, on Reddit bots are engaging with bots.
From what I can tell the only way to raise VC money is by saying AI 3 times. If the ritual is done correctly a magic seed round appears.
As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.
I'm extensively using ChatGPT Web UI. I don't use it much but I see value in Claude Code CLI. I've used Copilot in the past, recently I stopped using it, but I can see the value.
Other than that, I don't think I'd be happy to see AI anywhere else. I pretty much don't want no AI in my operating system, browser.
It’s great in photo shop. Removing a background has never been easier.
There are certainly lots of great use cases, the problem is everyone is shoving it everywhere because they don’t want to feel behind the times and for every great use case there are several times where it accomplishes nothing but makes the UI worse.
I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."
I don't mind AI. It can be pretty helpful sometimes in surprising ways. I just deeply dislike spywares.
For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".
I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.
Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
We are a very fucked-up industry.
I would love it if it could clean up my mp3 collection.
I know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.
That was part of what made the announcement of the Steam Machine such a joy - not one mention of it in sight. I suppose you could install Ollama on it, but where's the fun in that?
It's been a habit of mine for more than a decade to deactivate any feature with "smart" in its name by default. I want my machines to be predictable and stupid.
Exactly, for me it only makes sense when it is transparent, meaning voice controlling devices, handwriting recognition, getting better IDE tooling, and such.
Unfortunately got to meet those KPIs.
AI is useful. I use Claude code every single day for building software.
I also wouldn’t want to go back to only web search for finding things out. Search engines are generally inferior.
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
AI ad blocking might be nice.
I want it. They just need to figure out the ux. Chat ain't it. I'd love voice chat to access the web.
Right, I don't want AI integrated in my mobile phone either and just use it when I understand the information I am "leaking" (e.g. prompting)
I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other newly introduced features.
Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I’m rusty and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a query that mutates the db.
"How do I get a list of every resource in a project"
"How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count"
Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
Yeah, basically.
The new similar sound search in Ableton Live is handy. It's getting stem separation soon and I expect to get some use out of it.
Sure people do. Idiots are people right?
I am not against AI in Firefox. The thing is "what AI".
For example, translation can be considered AI, and I find it very useful, it is local too. Other AI features that could be nice would be speech-to-text, text-to-speech, advanced spellchecking, text autocomplete, etc... Bonus points if local models are used. I also see nothing wrong with having a "ask a LLM" entry in the right click menu like you have search, I think it is a common enough thing for people to do.
The problem with many AI features in software is that they serve no purpose besides "hey look, we have AI". Usually in the form of some button or text field that is always visible and does nothing more than prompt a poorly tuned LLM.
Honestly, i have never got any real benefit from an AI. I tried it on multiple occasions, but compared to my pre-ai life, AI has not really improved anything.
AI is basically only a shortcut to wikipedia, and i always anyway have to double check any AI response, making it kind of useless.
Yes. I want AI in some things (some)
What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it?
Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
i probably do, but i want it to work as some magic behind the scenes, not as an embedded chat app that i have to type in.
a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance
I want AI in all my development and entrepreneurial tools
Customers want humans to perform each menial task, while paying almost nothing for that privilege, so that they can have the satisfaction of screaming at someone when a mistake is made.
Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.
It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.
>Does anyone want AI in anything?
Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.
It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.
I can't even open Adobe Acrobat anymore. There's AI shit in almost every corner and toolbar of the app.
This shit makes me want to stop interacting with tech altogether and live on a farm. I don't know how much more of this I can take.
They need to access your data somehow
I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format.
I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.
I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh
I'd upvote this a 100 times. It's gotten to a point where, when I see a UI element, text, or email subject featuring those irritating twinkling-emojis that are supposed to indicate something between "magic" and "incredible speed", I feel physical uneasiness. Maybe it's precisely because of this contradiction that these symbols now stand for. Recently we purchased an .io domain for a product we're working on. Guess what, few days later there comes an e-mail with that twinkly-crap-start containing a suggestion that a ".com" domain for the same name is available, and that at a rather low price! Gasp! So I look it up...well yeah, it is a .com alright. But missing the bloody last letter of our name. Such is the crap that you get out of those LLMs, always incomplete, always missing something and this is increasingly the sentiment in the tech professionals community - no thanks, we don't want you to keep feeding us your slop, billions that you burned already into nothing be damned!
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
Yeah, they do. Go talk to anyone who isn't in a super-online bubble such as HN or Bsky or a Firefox early-adopter program. They're all using it, all the time, for everything. I don't like it either, but that's the reality.
> They're all using it.
Not really. Go talk to anyone who uses the internet for Facebook, Whatsapp, and not much else. Lots of people have typed in chatgpt.com or had Google's AI shoved in their face, but the vast majority of "laypeople" I've talked to about AI (actually, they've talked to me about AI after learning I'm a tech guy -- "so what do you think about AI?") seem to be resigned to the fact that after the personal computer and the internet, whatever the rich guys in SF do is what is going to happen anyway. But I sense a feeling of powerlessness and a fear of being left behind, not anything approaching genuine interest in or excitement by the technology.
If I talk to the people I know who don’t spend all their time online, they’re just not using AI. Quite a few of my close friends haven’t used AI even once in any way, and most of the rest tried it out once and didn’t really care for it. They’re busy doing things in the real world, like spending time with their kids, or riding horses, or reading books.
I talk to an acquaintance selling some homemade products on Etsy, he uses & likes the automatically generated product summary Etsy made for him. My neighbor asks me if I have any further suggestions for refinishing her table top beyond the ones ChatGPT suggested. Watching all of my coworkers using Google search, they just read the LLM summary at the top of the page and look no further. I see a friend take a picture, she uses the photo AI tool to remove a traffic sign from the background. Over lunch, a coworker tells me about the thing she learned about from the generated summary of a YouTube video.
We can take principled stands against these things, and I do because I am an obnoxiously principled dork, but the reality is it's everywhere and everyone other than us is using it.
Being busy riding horses and reading books are both niche activities (yes, reading too, sadly, at lest above a very small number of books which does not translate to people being busy doing it more than a tiny fraction of their time), which suggests perhaps your close friends are a rather biased set. Nothing wrong with that, but we're all in bubbles.
Way off. I've polled about this (informally) as well. Non-technical people think it's another thing they have to learn and do not want to (except for those who have been conditioned into constant pursuit of novelty, but that is not a picture of mental health or stability for anyone). They want technology to work for them, not to constantly be urged into full-time engagement with their [de]vices.
They are already preached at that they need a new phone or laptop every other year. Then there's a new social platform that changes its UI every 6 months or quarterly, and now similarly for their word processors and everything.
> I've polled about this (informally) as well.
This is kinda like how if you ask everyone how often they eat McDonald's, everyone will say never or rarely. But they still sell a billion burgers each year :) Assuming you're not polling your Bsky buddies, I suspect these people are using AI tools a lot more than they admit or possibly even know. Auto-generated summaries, text generation, image editing, and conversation prompts all get a ton of use.
Only if you are assuming I am asking so directly...
> They're all using it, all the time, for everything
Do you know someone? Using Firefox nowadays is itself a "super-online bubble"
The AI companies do. They want us to train their AIs for free by using them, and in many intense gaslightty cases as you've seen they even make us pay for it! What a powerful market though.
Step 1. Integrate AI
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.
How dare you deny your AI overlord an oportunity to train itself further on your data for free?!
[dead]
> Does anyone want AI in anything?
I most definitely do.
I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it.
I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state".
Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time.
Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
Literally this. I don’t know why this hasn’t been worked on. It’s the low hanging fruit with the most utility. Maybe that’s why cuz it’d be actually useful.
Just half an hour ago I needed to extra some text from a Notion page as JSON, and just popped the URL into Claude code and told it to use Playwright to extract the fields. I'd prefer to have it in Firefox, but the Firefox AI sidebar doesn't provide much meaningful integration (I'm sure there are extensions, and will probably look for that later, but the Playwright MCP server provided what I needed for now)
So, yes, I want AI in "everything".
And it's not a waste of resources if it's not triggered automatically.
The person you're replying to noted that there will be "edge cases." Your response exemplifies this.
In fact, I'd say you're an edge case's edge case. There should be a word for that. Maybe "one-off."
I don't think it exemplifies that at all. Using Playwright absolutely is, but that was my niche fallback to the lack of an integrated AI solution.
The use-case, which generalised is "pull some information from a web page", is far less niche, and I'd argue extremely common.
I know a lot of people - including non-technical people - who spend a lot of time doing that in ways ranging from entirely manual to somewhat more sophisticated, and the more technically knowledgeable of those have started looking for AI tools to help them with that.
To the extent users "don't want" AI available for things like this, it is mostly because they don't know AI could help with this.
E.g. just a few days ago, I had someone show me how they painstakingly copied column by column from the exact same Notion site I mentioned into a Google sheet, without realising it was trivially automatable. Or rather: Trivially automatable to a technical user like me. But it could be trivially automatable to anyone with relatively little integration effort in the browsers.
Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.
Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)
Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.
Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.
Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.
Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me:
- An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too
- Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA support just like Chrome
- A sync system which is ALWAYS end-to-end encrypted, and doesn't leak your browsing data or saved credentials if you configure it wrong, like Google's does, and it of course works on mobile too
- And yes, LLM-assisted summarization, translation, tab grouping, etc, most of which works entirely offline with local LLMs and no cloud interation, although there are some cloud enabled features as well
When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test that this week and their docs say to use a third-party extension.
They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature flag in nightly currently: https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-wi...
My favourite feature is userChrome. The default chrome sucks in both Chrome and Firefox, but at least Firefox allows me to customize it to my liking without forking the entire browser.
On the flip side, changing keybinds in Firefox requires forking, but the defaults aren't too bad.
There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.
Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.
But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there
> I notice people love to hate Firefox
They may be misplacing their hatred for Mozilla, which legitimately deserves the ire.
At this point that doesn't matter, does it? Mozilla has no teeth in which to bite with. They're not even close to. So is that really the priority?
In the meantime all these conversions accomplish is the sharpening of Google's teeth. Google not only has the capacity to bite but is actively demonstrating that they'll use their teeth.
So why the fuck do we complain about a dog with no teeth while another dog is eating our legs? Let's get our priorities right. Let's talk after we're not being bitten or if that dog starts eating our other leg.
they hate it because all the news about it is bad, and falls cleanly into the unignorable modern narrative that "everything is being corrupted and turning against users over time". Embedding corporate interests in a browser that was supposed to be for people (see: all the examples of them doing that) is morally disgusting and everyone hates it. The repulsiveness of it is more about the trend that it represents than the feature itself. We are soooooooo fucking tired of good things becoming bad and being unaccountable for it. To win our confidence, the right number of "betrayals of user trust" is absolutely zero, and it's not right now... and since they're ostensibly non-profit/open source the dissonance of "pretending to win trust" and then "betraying it" is especially jarring. When Google does something evil every day you're not surprised, just resigned; when Mozilla does something evil you're truly disappointed because they have no reason to; they were supposed to be good the good guys.
Yes. It's the hypocrisy that is annoying.
Google is expected to be evil so nobody is disappointed.
The annoying part is that Mozilla's lack of sainthood is used as justification to further Google's impiety.
It's a pattern we do a lot in many different settings. We help evil flourish when we concentrate on how tarnished a white knight is. It's petty
Are you sure this isn't perception bias?
Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"
Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.
We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.
yes, I'm sure. The claim is not "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is 'actually' evil", as if evil was some logical predicate that has a truth value which we are discovering the value of. The claim is "based on the (biased) examples I've seen, Mozilla is not morally trustworthy", because nobody who's trustworthy does any of the things we've seen. In every case they've got in trouble for, they were completely free to do not do the thing. There is no excusing that.
> You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM?
No, they're anti "putting LLMs in our software and shoving it in our faces" like literally every corporation is doing right now. You can find LLMs useful as a tool and despise the way corporations are trying to force them on you.
The right way for Mozilla to have Claude built-in is as an optional extension. That's... obvious. But anyway, the concern in the OP is not "Mozilla is adding LLM features" as much as it is the fact that despite this quote
"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."
They're going to do it anyway, and pretend like that didn't happen, because they are slimy; because they consistently do the wrong thing in every moral situation in a way that is tremendously disappointing. Because their attitude is consistently that the point of soliciting feedback is to give the appearance of soliciting feedback rather than a genuine concern for doing right by users.
Presumably you saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830770 about the Japanese translator quitting over being blatantly disrespected by the Mozilla bureaucracy. If your reaction to that is "I don't understand what Mozilla did wrong" then you don't understand how repulsive the "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with." response was. The grievance already happened, there was nothing else to discuss. Either the entity is capable of feeling empathy collectively (which is to say, the leadership is) and doing the right thing, or it isn't. When their response to fucking up is vapid damage control instead of genuine guilt... yeah, they're just acting like a corporate robot instead of human beings. Nobody wants that, nobody respects it, and nobody trusts it; they deserve all the critique they get until they have leadership that can demonstrate humanity.
(Not that they are the only ones. Mozilla is just particularly frustrating because there's no reason they couldn't; they're not even a public company; they could just do better things for free. We're in a societal epidemic of entities not demonstrating humanity but pretending to; if an actual person acted the way corporations do, with all the corpospeak bullshit + distortive messaging around doing shamelessly profit-seeking things--you would find them sickening and repulsive. Maybe you think we shouldn't hold corporations to human standards? I say, fuck that, that's what benefits them, not us; why shouldn't we seek a better world?)
Perfectly said, bravo!
To add to all of this, the "perception bias" argument falls apart when we consider that if Mozilla had done the good alternative this case, the very example that we are discussing — if they had made a pledge to never force AI on Firefox users — then it absolutely would have made the news and driven discussion. It would have been a bold statement that re-inspired faith.
I'm not saying don't criticize Mozilla. I'm saying don't act like their problems are even in the same ballpark as Google. Even if Mozilla was "equally evil" it's better to support them simply to distribute that power as I'd rather two evils fight than one evil reign. This is the problem we have and why I'm not addressing your points or why most people aren't. Because we too have the same problems with Mozilla but we recognize what we've been doing has just been giving Google more power. So let's not?
It's not about being dismissive, it's about prioritization.
Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation. I'm not surprised they're trying to do anything they can to survive and that that also involved many bad ideas. Like you said, they're free. But do you donate? How do they fund themselves? They don't have an ad empire to back them up. You might say the CEO is paid too much and I'll agree but this is also a silly conversation when we look at other CEOs pay. The complaint is more a manifestation of being frustrated with Mozilla and a justification. If it was really about the money we'd be prioritizing our conversations about the companies giving magnitudes more. You don't complain about wasting pennies while dollars are flying out the window. So let's make sure we're on the same page.
All this comes down to: if not Firefox, who?
Picking chrome/chromium creates a monopolization of the infrastructure of the Internet. By a mega corp who's primary goal is to destroy privacy. A corporation who is already demonstrating that they will dictate the specifications of internet protocols and in their own interest.
Picking Safari gives undue power to a different mega corp who is less interested in destroying privacy (more ambivalent) but interested in walled gardens.
Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy. It's the backbone of privacy browsers like Tor and Mullvad.
Picking Ladybird is currently not viable as it's still in alpha.
I'd say we're going "most to least evil" through that list. I won't call any of them saints or perfectly moral. That's not the bar!
I don't actually want to replace Google's dominance with Mozilla dominance and I don't think most pro Firefox people do either. We want competition in the space. I don't want any one entity controlling the internet. I don't want any 2 or 3! I want healthy competition with more actors than we have today because any dominating player risks jeopardizing the entire internet. So at this point it doesn't matter how good or bad Mozilla is, it really only matters that someone is fighting Google. Its priorities. We're so far gone that we don't have the liberty to have that discussion because frankly Mozilla has no teeth. Let's talk when they can bite or when they're close to having that capacity. Until then, stop sharpening Google's teeth!
the point of taking a big moral stance against Mozilla -- in fact, against anyone is
> if not Firefox, who?
Firefox! But run well!
The point of complaining about someone fucking up, or shaming them, is to get them to stop. They're the ones who should be doing good; they're in the position to do so; they know how; their hubris/capture by money/interests/class/ignorance/something is preventing it. They need only listen to solve this problem. And maybe wholesale replace leadership, I dunno. But replacing bad leadership is way easier than writing a new browser for scratch.
(a secondary purpose of complaining is to promulgate good norms to everybody else so that everybody's on the same page about what respectable behavior would look like)
> Let's be honest here, Firefox is only alive because Google needs them to avoid monopoly regulation.
sad to say, I agree.
[dead]
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
> if you care about your privacy?
I think you just answered your own questions.
Then explain Brave then. They market as privacy but it has similar issues being chromium. The most critical being that by being chromium Google still gets to dictate how the internet works
I'm not sure they did. What do you think is the answer to "Why would you trust chrome if you care about privacy?"
GP said:
> I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy?
I believe the vast majorty of people do not care about their privacy, answering GP's question.
I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good.
Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
> re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
The issue is that the data isn't limited to device type and Google uses this data to sell to marketers. The more data they have on you, the more money they make which is why they're incentivized to break the rules and vacuum up as much data as possible even if it breaks the law. Hence, less than 6 months ago they paid over a billion dollars for "unlawfully tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and collecting biometric data without proper consent"[1]
They're incentivized to abuse your data and owning the browser allows them for unchecked access to your internet browsing and information about you.
1. https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/06/01/time-to-uninstall-goog...
Well, we'll see. Google have all my info really, including emails and photos and in ~25 years of using them I haven't heard of anything particularly bad happening. They used to have my full location data but offloaded it to my device slightly to my annoyance so they don't get hassled by law enforcement asking where people are. I think people sometimes people worry about the wrong stuff.
The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer over Firefox, because it was already installed on their device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.
> All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.
Nail on the head. Longtime Firefox user. All the way back to when it was called Netscape in fact, though I did roll chrome for a few years before coming back.
It was sometime around Mozilla's acquisition/integration of Pocket that shit started going sideways. Though, aside from the ad/privacy bullshit recently, their decisions haven't necessarily been "bad" ones so much as strange ones, and are all too often opt-out by default instead of opt-in. I just constantly find myself asking "Why?" more than actively being against what they're doing.
These days I use waterfox as it's Firefox without all the weird decisions (and telemetry), but truth be told the only reason I recommend Water/Firefox to anyone these days is by-and-large when they're bitching about ads and why their adblock doesn't work as well as it used to because of chrome and their MV3 chicanery. There are other reasons to use firefox, but for the average/casual user that's the main differentiator between it and chrome.
> every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike
Don't blame developers for management decisions.
Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.
Personally, I don't really see the value proposition in being able to load and serve you ads faster, compared to a browser with a proper ad blocker.
I don't know what you mean; uBlock Origin Lite blocks every ad on any page I visit in Safari and Chrome, even YouTube ads. Safari also blocks tracker cookies by default, and is significantly faster than Firefox in my use.
The average user does not care about ads being present. Speed is paramount.
Shouldn't getting rid of all the ads make things notably faster?
It does. Fundamentally.
I disagree. I have installed adblockers on different relatives machines. Without fail, they mentioned how much better surfing now is.
They did not not mind the ads, they just didn‘t know there is an easy way to get rid of them
You are radically underestimating how much slow web performance is caused by the massive volume of ads and user tracking data attached to each site.
I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge side by side all the time, and I never experience any difference in page load times except on YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.
The performance is fine and has always been fine for me, across multiple OS, since it was called Phoenix onward. No issue. Never had a very top-of-the-line machine, either.
Slower than Chrome? That's like looking over at the sports car next to you when you're driving and being jealous, IMO
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid.
I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.)
I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again.
But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."
Excellent point. Google can point to this browser with sub 5% market penetration as an alternative in anti-trust hearings, so keeping it on life support is beneficial.
What's horrid? I have been using stock Firefox for half my lifetime and it's fine. One is already being esoteric enough using a 2% market share browser; do I have to be even more esoteric and use a 2% of the 2%?
Exactly this.
I use librewolf, but for non-tech savvy, relatives where that would not be an option, I'm not exactly gonna recommend barebones vanilla Firefox either.
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation.
You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
I think Lizard is the best UI for elements hiding in FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextensi...
The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex
More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f...
I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools.
For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.
Firefox should commit more to correctly implement web standards - not even gradients render correctly. A lot of the users are oddballs with strange configurations that break everything. No wonder devs optimize for chrome.
One longstanding issue with gradients was fixed recently.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771
> Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
Why would an average user switch to Firefox because it's the 20th browser to release a half-baked AI integration?
> Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity.
Why don't they spend the time innovating to make the browser engine faster and more stable? IIRC, they canceled that project. Instead they focus on stuff like yet another VPN and now this AI assistant.
Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
The pessimism can get old.
I don’t know. I‘m always a bit appalled that getting privacy in firefox requires you to disable so many flags in the user.js or use something like arkenfox. It feels kind of dishonest of them that they don‘t surface those settings when they‘re enabled by default. Of course there is librefox, but still I feel like there shouldn’t even have to be reason for an extra fork like that.
You mean the standards that Google adds to chrome and then turns into standards?
> any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity
because these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.
It's an attempt to make firefox like chrome, in the hopes of getting some of chrome's marketshare.
Stop it - firefox should be it's own identity, and serve the user's needs. It should depend in large part on donations from users, and not from corporations except as no-string attached donations.
It should not have such a large team of non-contributors drawing funds and working on initiatives unrelated to improving the browsing experience.
It’s losing market share because it doesn’t keep up with supporting the latest web standards.
They’re losing market share because they’re not bundled with {OS of choice} / not heavily pushed on you when you visit a Google property
And because they are wasting their time on these side quests that could have been spent improving the actual browser.
Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?
For example Firefox could fix it's issues with VSS crashing on GPU's so that Linux distros like Nobara don't have to ditch Firefox as the standard browser in favour of Brave. Granted, that would only get them back a couple of hundred users but hey: marketshare?
For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.
They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.
> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.
edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.
Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.
How the mighty have fallen.
For sure.
For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.
FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.
It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
> Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I do not believe that this is the case. Their #1 revenue source is Google. The moment they start regaining any foothold?
Imagine just collecting that amount from Google as tax, and funding Mozilla publicly.
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
> they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source
They probably would've achieved enough to sustain Firefox development in perpetuity if they invested most of Google's money in a fund.
They do exactly that! Their endowment is now $1.2 billion and its year to year growth is one of their strongest non-Google revenue streams.
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
> Chrome has essentially won. ... Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch
You hit the nail on the head with this one
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
People in the organization are trying to use what's left of the name recognition and all that money to benefit their own initiatives.
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
What would you say is the most costly initiative that's siphoning money away from core browser development right now?
Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
I'm not opposed to activism, I'm just opposed to their activism which goes against what the Mozilla Foundation stands for. Obviously what I think the foundation stands for (a freely accessible web) and what it actually stands for are two different things, but I like my rose tinted glasses.
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.
So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.
I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.
It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.
In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.
>that mostly just take out tracking and AI features
Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.
Not only several Firefox forks, but also an entirely new browser effort ought to be a wakeup call to Mozilla: Ladybird
I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.
An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.
Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.
Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.
Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.
Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.
Rust/Servo/Quantum culminated in tangible benefits that reflect successfully played out projects from which Firefox reaped major rewards. And FireFox OS, perhaps more than any other, is something I wish we had right now, because if they never gave up on it and we had a 10+ year old alternative mobile OS waiting for its moment, it could have been well positioned in a moment like this one where Android is increasingly betraying the trust of its developers. I think the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership, quickly forgotten, could have been meaningful if there was good vision.
Yahoo had a major collection of properties that still had relevance, and core services like email, search and maps that I remember Matt Yglesias (of all people) insisting would have been the keys to the success of a FirefoxOS. Yahoo had the infrastructure, but no vision and a bad brand, and Mozilla was the inverse. An interesting what-if that unfortunately amounted to nothing.
"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important"
Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.
Yep. Everyone understands email, not everyone understands that email is federated, and yet everyone benefits from federation.
I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-....
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla
Sufficiently accurate. That’s the reason they’re trying all these things. It’s because the original objective was met and now they’re trying to find something else to put all their money to.
> with fewer restrictions on extensions
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
I want Mozilla Observatory.
They did a good job with that.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory
> Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
Amen. I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
> I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.
The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).
Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
I dont care if Firefox is faster than chrome or edge.
I care about privacy, security, and the web as a whole.
Activism and kids playing at Mozilla was a long time ago.
> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money
Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.
Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
And part of the Corp's profits fund the Foundation, not the other way around. We get a discussion about this every few months in the HN comments, in case anyone wants to look it up.
Right, and my understanding is that structuring lets them do the search licensing deals that have been the lifeline of the whole org.
A distinction without substance
And yours redundant, I made that clear already.
> nitpick
> to find faults in details that are not important
I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking, have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly.
Currently they've at least got one of the three.
They really need to work on making an easier transition from Chrome if they care about converting users. Add an out of the box (preferably default) option to make the tabs look normal and not ugly like they are now. Change the private window shortcut to Cmd(Ctrl)+Shift+N like every browser has standardized on. Also I swear they override the normal text input behaviour, specifically if I'm using option+left/right arrows to jump between tokens in the URL bar, it jumps my cursor to unexpected places, like at the wrong side of periods.
Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off everything Chrome does in that department.
What setting is there to make the tabs look better?
Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.
And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.
They also need to integrate with windows/enterprise setups better, that's one of the main reasons people use chrome based browsers.
You'd think so, you'd really fucking think so, but Firefox is genuinely by far the slowest on Linux. On Windows it's closest to Chrome.
Are you using the Ubuntu Snap to train Firefox? If so, you can switch to the native Debian packages released directly by Mozilla. They don't do that sandboxing stuff, and they are a lot faster. I don't notice any speed difference between Chromium und Firefox even on a Raspberry Pi.
doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”?
what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.
If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know enough to put any weight behind that statement.
It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.
I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.
You didn't even read 6 sentences into TFA. 52/52 of the closed-beta testers of this feature want it removed.
that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.
Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias, you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to piss off if their poll result is a unanimous "no".
So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.
Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
They didn't poll 52 people, the 52 are comments
If you ask for feedback, and then you receive feedback, that is literally polled data: polling is the act of soliciting and then recording opinion-based data.
(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)
> grandma isn't a beta tester
Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is.
If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.
yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and clicking around.
Who exactly are those closed-beta testers, and what makes you think they are representative of the average user?
Before accusing people of not having read TFA maybe you should do some critical thinking yourself.
I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and in the next paragraph mention 52 responses to the announcement at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from anyone. Very different thing.
I thought the 52 were just forum randos?
how is 52 users representative??
It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52 definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said no.
I'm fairly sure the 52 are comments to their announcement and not beta testers. There may be some overlap but not enough data to say 100%
If they are purely random, it's damning. Flip a coin until you get heads 52 times in a row.
I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on the Mozilla Connect forum.
The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator.
Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.
Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest.
>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries
I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.
Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
If you tell this to someone who has never used LLMs/AI they may be curious. I have though. I also understand how the technology works and that you will have to read those research papers yourself anyway, verify every source, check every fact (including the ones that got omitted). Maybe it’s better than previous gen machine translation, but you better not rely on context and subtle sentiments being translated as intended all the time.
If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).
Maybe talk to the recently resigned Japanese translation team leader about how good AI translations are.
They are miles better than the ordinary machine translators. That's all that matters, because I can't afford a personal human translator to browse the web.
Human translation is obviously better, but not by much, especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human.
That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
I myself can see using that some day. I was dismissive of AI-assisted search results, now I'm back to using google search most of the time over duckduckgo, because of quality. I don't want to be forced to abandon firefox down the road. Every feature they add,from pocket,vpns, to this, is optional. Just don't use it. Let firefox get more marketshare. It's the only Google alternative.
Another example of "nobody I know" and not nobody.
[flagged]
>It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other medium or social you check.
That tells more about your socials than anything else. I personally know plenty of non-technical folks using ChatGPT (because it's the only buzzword they know) to augment their browsing in an awkward manner. They want utility, they don't give a damn about anyone's sentiments.
I'm not a techbro and I want this. I know other people who aren't techbros who want it as well. So what makes your anecdotal evidence any stronger than mine? Maybe you and the author shouldn't be speaking for everyone.
Speak for yourself, I do want to see Mozilla experimenting with new features and functionality opened up by new technology. Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be trying new things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It's new technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla should be on the forefront of figuring it out.
Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing.
Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me?
AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).
It's nice for extracting data from a page into some structured format (e.g. CSV). Much quicker than trying to whip up a JS script or something.
> 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so they're more likely to need it than you.
It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
> It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
Not at all, I just think going around seeing if AI fits is the same as going around with a hammer looking for nails. Let the problems lead you to a solution, don't start with "what can we solve with this?"
"You'll have computers in your home, you can look at a schedule or store recipes!" AI is being shoehorned in weird places, it's in the "kitchen recipes" stage where all we can come up with are chatbots. I think it's premature and wasteful, and will cost regular users a lot of money on wasted AI potential simply because these companies have to recoup some of their investment, even at the cost of user experience and utility.
> What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read?
In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I find that having a quick chat about a document after reading it is a good way to interrogate my own understanding of the document.
I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future. You've got to walk before you can run.
Brave user here, I use Leo way more than I thought I would for this exact reason. I ask it to summarize a large .NET documentation topic for me, or explain a coding topic while I try and learn the latest thing. It reads the page and I dont have to copy URLs or paste texts, I just click and ask.
I use the AI side bar quite often, not having to manage windows/tabs to have the chat and the main content I am reading at the same time is nice.
Probably that it's a decent first step, with a well defined feature set and user expectations, so a nice thing to try before they figure out what to do next. And the article this comment thread is about is a reaction to one of their announcements in that regard: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-window/
An AI that automatically clicks through cookie walls, declining everything: yes please!
Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.
AI overuse drives me crazy but the steelman is that new technologies often involve a cringe experimentation phase before they find their "killer apps."
E.g. they tried to put steam engines on everything. Steam powered wagons that tore up roads, steam powered rowing machines, steam powered legs for amputees. All really dumb uses of technology. But steam engines on trains, ships and factories changed the world.
Just because we don't want Mozilla to waste precious resources developing clearly unwanted features does not mean we don't want them to experiment. This isn't experimentation. It's being a sheep.
But LLMs became possible precisely due to centralized server, their economies of scale, and their capacity to train on user data. All of which are against the core tenets of locality, privacy and low cost (gratis) of FOSS.
Sorry guys, but this one is not for you. Unless you go all in on microchips so powerful that they enable local LLMs, but even that seems to be outside of the FOSS competency as it involves hardware, which FOSS doesn't usually touch (with the exception of raspberry pi's and some libre phones)
This is precisely the sort of political demand for stagnation that I'm talking about. Doing your best to make RMS proud isn't going to make this technology go away.
Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about.
This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.
Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.
This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time:
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:
Firefox OS: 2013
Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Directory Tiles: 2014
Pocket acquisition: 2015
Firefox Focus: 2015
Cliqz experiment: 2017
"Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
> Firefox OS: 2013
Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)
> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.
> Directory Tiles: 2014
Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.
> Pocket acquisition: 2015
Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?
> Firefox Focus: 2015
Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?
> Cliqz experiment: 2017
That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?
> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.
Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?
I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.
Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.
The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).
So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.
Thanks for this. Used Firefox since 1.0. Donate to their non-profit arm every month.
Chrome is openly hostile to users and Safari is such a vanilla experience with poorly implemented extensions.
Until Ladybird drops, I don't plan on switching browsers.
Same! I remember when Firefox 2 and 3 were major marketing and media events, and the subject of great excitement from users almost akin to the release of a new iPhone.
I think it's unfortunate we got away from that cadence though I'm sure it was for good reasons I don't fully appreciate.
You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.
> (1) They spend more on browser development now...
Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.
> (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...
This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
> (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).
> (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...
The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
> (5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...
You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
> (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.
You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").
I'm only going to pick out a handful of these, because otherwise the conversation would be long, but the through line in all of these is that they're not accountable to baseline factual accuracy (and yes, that matters), and they're attempting to rehabilitate malformed criticisms without taking responsibility for the criticisms in the form they've been expressed, and even the attempts at rehabilitation are flawed.
>Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy.
I know you wanted to keep this conversation outside the realm of facts, but that's hard to do when active internet users in 2009 were around 1.77 billion and are now at 5.5 billion, spending in the industry as a whole has exploded, browser complexity has grown to the point that they are effectively mini operating systems, the complexity of the ecosystem of web apis and standards and complexity of security has expanded by orders of magnitude.
Moreover, treating the change in market share like a failure is nonsense in a world where distribution is dominated by OS bundling and defaults. Firefox could double its dev budget and still lose share if Microsoft, Apple, and Google keep leaning on their platform power.
So there are so many levels on which to reject the premise of "spending more to achieve less", which I think it goes to show that measuring these criticisms against the factual record is actually extremely important.
And again, I would reiterate that you're not taking responsibility for voluminous criticisms that are more real than you seem to recognize, which quite literally do suggest that the side bets siphoned away real resources n from software development. You yourself are making a form of that argument, but characterizing it as "distraction", which conveniently can't be measured in development funds or lines of code, but hinges on subjectively judged abstractions (aka vibes) like mind share and "focus".
>This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground.
Unless you think that the dynamics driving Chrome's initial rise in market share stopped being leveraged, the significance of its platform dominance in explaining its market share is every bit true now as it was then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If anything it's only intensified. And again, this is not taking responsibility for the actual criticisms in the forms they have been expressed, which tend to make no such distinction, mention market share collapse explicitly, and omit the rise of Chrome from the story entirely.
>This is a straw man.
I promise you it's not, and if I wanted to be uncharitable I could have emphasized some truly off the charts claims people have made with every ounce of confidence and self-assurance that they spoke on behalf of the Mozilla user base, e.g. conspiratorial suggestions that the nonprofit/corporate subsidiary organization is intended to trick people, that they're manipulating their nonprofit reporting figures, completely sincere but inaccurate attempts to claim that the VPN and Pocket were substantial money sinks, conspiratorial insinuations of quid pro quo cooperation with Google's monopoly, or most amazingly, a categorical claim that Quantum was abandoned rather than finished.
Some of the criticisms, quite forcefully made here on HN, have been that Mozilla ignores feature requests, either generally, or specific ones, like tab customizations, or, in this thread, WebUSB. Everyone dies on a slightly different hill. But they all tie the issue of market share to the issue of "focus" on the browser however quantified. And if you don't think it's a matter of feature development, the logic is equally flawed if you substitute a new preferred term like "core browser". Just like there's no magic feature that restores the market share overnight, there's no such thing as a sufficient threshold of focus on the core browser that achieves that restoration of market share.
>You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism
I think that misreads the balance of emphasis in my comment. I would say my comment was a dispute of the vast majority of ventured criticisms, combined with an acknowledgment of proportionately a small few. There are needles of legitimate criticism buried a haystack of spurious nonsense. I would also suggest it's a bit of a misread in a more important sense, in that I'm attempting to demonstrate a degree of case-by-case reasonableness that contrasts with the one-dimensional nature of criticisms. Both in this thread and in my general experience and defenses of Firefox are even handed and willing to acknowledge criticisms, and that spirit of even-handedness is not reciprocated in criticisms that ever recognize their rhetorical excess. In fact I would argue in this conversation it's being abused in an attempt to leverage it into a confession of a contradiction.
That's not everything, but I think it serves as a representative encapsulation. If you want, pick out whichever point you believe is your strongest unanswered objection, and I'll hear you out, though we might be far enough into this comment tree that HN won't give me the option to reply.
>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser
Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.
I think it would have to be alternative search licenses, crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering.
There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option.
I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two.
So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying.
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.
I don’t understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team is anemic.
Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.
I don't want AI in Firefox.
For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.
So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.
Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.
I don't think you can apply Unix philosophy to a (GUI) web browser, you don't use it compositionally.
In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).
Not literally. But in spirit.
I don't want my web browser to be a mediocre PDF reader. I want my good and perfected PDF reader to be a PDF reader. I don't want my web browser to be a Web development IDE. I want a specialised (version of) a browser with all the developer tools and one that lacks all these features is lighter, safer and simpler for browsing. I don't want an FTP client in my web browser (I don't want one anywere lol). Firefox was extracted from Mozilla back in the days exactly because Mozilla had become a browser that was bloated and crammed full of features that were unpolished or just subpar. Firefox saved Mozilla and fought back by being lean, fast, and terribly focused at doing one thing and doing talhat well.
I want a browser that's good and forever improving in letting me browse the web and run and use web-apps.
> you don't use it compositionally.
I would if I could!
Nothing really stops you from doing curl | awk , but you probably aren't.
curl is not a replacement for a web browser. No Javascript, no DOM.
But that's basically the promise, that the damn thing _can_ use arbitrary things compositionally.
by this logic sockets are also non-unix
I mean, that's not exactly wrong...
> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.
Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.
A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.
You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack
> For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".
I think that browsers abandoned this well before Firefox (or indeed, Mozilla) existed. These days a browser is an everything platform—perhaps ai could mitigate some of this damage.
We're most of the way there in a sense. Programmatic control of the browsers exist with e.g. Playwright and similar.
But some niceties to e.g. allow running scripts with filtered/permissioned access within a sidebar would be nice.
I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.
You can open Chrome with a remote debugging port enabled and send commands to it using the Devtools Protocol. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
Does this work headless?
Mozilla's gonna Mozilla.
I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.
It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
It's a garbage feature that no one appears to have asked for.This is just as user friendly as the rest of the firefox configuration. I can't recommend it to anyone in good faith anymore.
They are promising to, along with the AI tab misfeature, add one button in preferences to turn off all the AI features.
At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused, AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings, like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting protection that many sites don't play nice with.
So sick of all these hacks. I've been a Firefox user for decades but it's time to throw in the towel.
> it's time to throw in the towel
And do what? Use a Chromium-based browser, which is infinitely worse?
Forks exist
If Mozilla needs ill-fated diversification attempts to try to stay afloat, forks are in an even worse situation.
Certainly starting to feel that way isn't it.
It's frustrating that the choice is between "becoming bad" (firefox) and "much worse" (chrome).
I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.
You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
Yet features that start optional sometimes get nudged more front-and-center over time
From their history, you can expect the exact opposite. Remember the Mr robot fiasco?
Firefox somehow fell into the hole of feature-pack in an effort to save itself.
Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.
They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
Signed, a 20 year user.
Firefox IS a high performance browser that is nice to use. It has much more tab management features than chrome and the speed is indistinguishable!
I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.
I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
Is it really that big of a task? More so than maintaining custom spellcheck dictionaries in every supported language? Even if they only implemented OS spellcheck compatibility on MacOS and Windows and just used the existing custom spellcheck on other OSes, that'd still be a huge improvement and they'd only have to do the work for two OSes rather than every OS that Firefox supports.
Firefox has always felt rather bad on Mac. Ages ago they made Camino, which was basically "aqua Firefox" and it was nice.
They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and text reader modes.
There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.
They can steal Workspaces from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in RSS client form Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the ability to save sessions from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in notes from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the tab stacking from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
Containers.
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
Containers seemed great to me at first but eventually they actually got in my way just as profiles do.
I just ended up with mounds of rules about what to open in the same container vs not, what urls to force in a given container, etc.
I still want to like them, but TBH, I don't miss them in Vivaldi.
Totally willing to accept I was doing containers wrong, I guess, but in that case, I don't know what "right" would've looked like.
That was also my story and I abandoned containers that time. But it turns out to be more about bad default UI.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
So I'd need an extension from my extension? :)
Maybe I can go back to Zen just to get more layers out of my browser sammich.
> Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
Not being so weirdly buggy on Windows. It's my main browser but man does it have odd behaviors that need restarts occasionally.
> Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
Firefox already has vertical tabs and they work great.
> Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
I'm pretty sure that Firefox has profile switching in some capacity, although I don't personally use it and can't vouch for it.
As for the rest of these, I agree completely. Firefox has too many wacky AI experiments and not enough normal browser features.
> They can start with fixing the spell check
Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.
I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in a minority.
* I summarize articles.
* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.
* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.
* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.
* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.
Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.
Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.
The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.
As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.
And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.
> The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu.
It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
How about it leaving it disabled and letting me enable it immediately if/when I choose.
This is a strange concept to me.
When companies add additional features to a product I use, I generally want to be notified about them so that I can make an informed decision about whether I want them enabled or disabled.
you can make this choice but it must be your choice. AI-in-Browser must be one of the biggest spy-profilers in the history of tech.
Zero AI in Firefox - I will compile from source rather than tolerate AI in the browser.
Welllll.. Yes and no.
If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)
But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.
It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.
Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.
Why would they want AI?
On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform.
It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature.
For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.
Everything but web games which almost always perform better on chrome. Probably not Firefox’s fault 95% of the time though
I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.
Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel). It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+ until relatively recently.
It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.
World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on....
Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D
I have used WebUSB exactly once: to use the GrapheneOS webinstaller. I keep a copy of Chromium around and use it about once a year for some kind of nonsense along these lines.
I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.
After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it
They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the v3 manifest limitations.
I would love AI in the browser, as long as it is offered, not aggressively pushed in my face, is privacy friendly (i.e. ideally client side but at the very least I need to understand what is sent off the device, how it is used, and it should only be sent when I actively trigger the feature).
In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.
But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.
I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.
I love having built-in local natural language translation implemented by AI, which Firefox provides. Local models have different properties than remote properties, and natural language translation is a useful thing. AI should be added when it solves a real need, and the risks can be minimized (or at least controlled). The goal shouldn't be to use AI, the goal should be to solve problems for humans.
People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.
Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.
> People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.
Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.
Yes, the article is about Mozilla, yes I was sloppy in expanding the scope without saying as much.
Microsoft is definitely the most overt in all of this, but Google is working on built in WebAPIs[1], Opera has integrations (sidebars too), Brace includes Leo, and then of course there are the "AI first" companies like Perplexity, Arc etc...
The problem is often that almost all browser features lurk in the background without you really knowing whether they are active or what their scope really ends up being. Cookies, javascript, and various other aspects of the reality of using the web have been abused for mass tracking (and surveillance)
So what's this got to do with Mozilla? Unless Mozilla is encouraging the use of local models, they are just encouraging the development of the same technology that has gotten us into this trouble in the first place. Maybe they should continue the work that meta started -- support development/use of open models of AI and guarantee the AI feature will be completely sandboxed in useful ways.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
The reason I don't want AI integrated into my browser (or really anything else) is that the mental model for big tech moved from "providing value" to "capturing value" about 15 years ago, and I expect they will try to use this integration in an attempt to build a layer between the customer and all downstream services (stores, banks, information) so they can extract some form of tax on every transaction (ads, micro-fees), all while consolidating data about me to create new sources of revenue. I am one of those 'bright minds' who has wasted their talent improving marketing conversion by 0.001% instead of working to cure cancer. (Let's be honest, improvements are way better than 0.001%, I am good at my job).
I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.
Ladybird might be a good alternative in a couple years
Well, as long as:
- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,
- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,
- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),
- and the weights and training code are open,
I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.
As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any issues with that.
E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?
I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.
If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.
Yeah, I just gave an example elsewhere of turning a Notion page into a JSON object, that Claude Code trivially did with Playwright, but that'd be far nicer if I could just click a button to talk about the current page. I'd be happy for it to be sandboxed, as long as it's easily accessible.
Really, I intend to push it into a Google Sheet, and ideally I'd just want a bookmark to do that, but for now I guess I'll settle for a script I can give a URL to. For a lot of people's daily manual chores, the ability to ask an LLM to solve it, and bookmark a "ask this again about another page" action would be a gamechanger.
There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the masses.
What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.
I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.
Tweeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525
I go back to pre-Firefox Mozilla browsers. What I want is faster, less bloat and far better memory management - a corrorlary is probably 'fix all outstanding bugs'. Were it me, I'd put a moratorium of three years on adding anything new, AI in particular.
As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M
Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.
There are already APIs being developed that assume a browser has an LLM either inside it or otherwise available, see for instance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Summarizer_...
So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.
Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas, and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome and their search engine.
I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.
I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.
Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.
Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.
Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".
The fact that Mozilla thinks people want AI in Firefox is proof that Mozilla has the wrong leadership.
I like the AI support in Firefox. It's there, useful and when I don't want to use it, I don't use it.
As a ChatGPT subscriber I use it more since when I can just open a dedicated sidebar in Firefox with ChatGPT inside.
Only reason Firefox has 2% market share is that Mozilla's leaders keep listening to a tiny, loud minority of extremely online luddites instead of delivering actual users what they want. The anti-AI set on HN is the same set that claims users want feature phones, not smartphones. They'd probably also be against long-distance telephone lines and the wheel.
I mean, who were they listening to when they acquired Pocket and integrated it into Firefox? Or decided to build their own video chat service? Or an encrypted file sharing service? Or Persona, Firefox OS, Firefox Hello, etc etc. These weren't just bad decisions in retrospect, these were clearly bad decisions at the time.
https://killedbymozilla.com/
It kills me that they leave out features desired by more or less everybody (like ad-block), while they add completely superfluous features like AI and Pocket to the core of Firefox.
It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.
Wrong, Google wants it very much. Otherwise there would be a usable, well-maintained web browser without AI on the market and everyone would just use it
What is most upsetting is that they just offered access to the large commercial AI providers and no clear way to have a self-hosted or alternative option. THIS is where they lost their way. They must be profiting or partnering, no longer serving the community.
Mozilla spending their limited resources on something so absurd and irrelevant seems extremely strange.
People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.
Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.
To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.
Go to about:config and set browser.ml.enabled to false and throw in browser.ml.chat.enabled (false) for good measure. Done.
You'd think so, but you also need to set browser.ml.chat.menu to false to remove a context menu item.
Looking at https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/components... it is a bit weird, that there isn't a general check for browser.ml.enabled true/false.
Yeah, there should really just be one global setting.
Also note that it's browser.ml.enable (no "d") vs. browser.ml.chat.enabled, to make matters even more infuriating.
I think the option to disable the context menu item is right in said context menu. Best place to put the option honestly, I wish all AI features had a disable button right next to them.
Even if LLMs seem to have reached their limits, and are no longer on the feature path towards AGI, I have a fundamental (possibly irrational) dislike for anything labeled AI, just in case this does become a stepping stone towards AGI.
On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation.
In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced advertising or digital currency for that matter.
"We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow."
You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.
I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I have questions.
My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)
> Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.
I have used that feature for a few weeks now and find it utterly useless.
Partly because it is squished. But mostly because it offers no value over just having a tab open with Claude (or in my case Mistral).
The extra buttons (summarize) and integration (context menu) hardly ever work (pages and selections are often too large for gpt, copilot, mistral or even claude and the sidebar just gives an error) but even if they did: what problem do these extra buttons and integrations solve? Am I missing something?
Do note that I would love integration the other way around: to have an AI agent (through an MCP for example) drive my firefox. Safely, contained, etc etc. I am not an AI luddite. I just find the firefox sidebar offering no value at all.
I think that's exactly what people are doing w the Playwright MCP...
It's indeed exactly what I do.
And I think Firefox should step up and become a better alternative to playwright. One geared at developers with tools like profiling, dom-manipulation (basically the Developer Console) assertions, visual comparison etc. Or (and?) one geared towards normal browsing and interacting with webapps.
I was also frustrated by the short context length for summarizing and found you can increase it in about:config via:
browser.ml.chat.maxLength
I googled* it and dod the same. But that merely moves the problem forward. Now the API returns errors that it's too large.
A smarter client would use a tool chain in which the first step is a model that's good at taking large contexts/data and extracting actual content from it. Many sites have a very low S/N ratio (readable content / dom).
Then pass that content, eg markdown, along to a model that's optimized at getting relevant parts out of content for the task at hand.
And only then onto the generic model to "do stuff" with it.
But many clients, including afaiks the Firefox one, just send the entire dom or html along to a generic model.
*Well DuckDuckGo
Being able to e.g. hook up Claude Code to any webpage would be killer for both web development and task automation.
I already do this via docker desktop MCPs in which I run a.o. Playwright¹.
Zed and VS code can now drive a browser. E.g. to perform tasks like "run the site on a local server and verify that you see the counter increase when you click this new plus-button"
¹https://hub.docker.com/mcp/server/playwright/overview
Thanks, I'll try this in Zed!
I thought the AI pane was convenient. Then I wanted to try a different AI service, and couldn't do so without losing all the content in the currently open pane. And I realized - this would be so much better if it was just a regular tab. Like we already have.
I do. It's nice to have when you want it and ready to not use if you don't. The more options the better. It's also nice when it's built in so you don't have to take extra steps to use it when you want to use it.
Most of the loudest critics - and, I’ve found, many commenters on HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology users. To think that nobody wants these features isn’t based on what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more “I don’t like AI and everyone else should agree” rather than “the data shows that nobody likes AI”.
Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).
Had to scroll way too far to find a comment like this. Unfortunately HN famously doesn’t understand what the average consumer wants. The Dropbox comment comes to mind.
I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in tech.
I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here.
Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and then turning out to be wrong?
Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by Dropbox, the band.
The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing my original comment.
Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.
Much appreciated. :)
Edit: shame it wasn't about the band and the song though.
This is going to be disliked, but it's my opinion:
I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.
I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when needed. I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any company that creates a free tool to keep users in their ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?
So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly attached to the old ways.
To create an AI that people will want to use, we need people to use it so we get better data, improve it, and learn how to control models. It’s a catch-22. I definitely don’t want AI tabs in Firefox but I can see why all this might be necessary because of massive potential for a superintelligence to solve problems or open new doors we didn’t know existed. But then we have to ask ourselves if these new pathways for humanity are so far removed from what humans can accomplish on their own, is there pride in a new revolution akin to the human derived pride in what we have accomplished on our own for the Industrial Revolution, for example, or even just petrol or nuclear power discovery?
Allow me to be a devil's advocate here. I don't natively like AI in Firefox. But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.
Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.
Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.
Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.
The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.
Edit: rearranged paragraphs.
“But let's allow ourselves to imagine that Firefox has a help menu that can respond to AI. Now let's imagine a help agent (helper?) that can agentically make changes to Firefox Settings using AI.”
Dear god, no. The last thing I want to be doing is telling grandma over the phone how to sweet-talk the settings screen into turning her adblocker back on.
May be Mozilla have a point.
Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.
Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.
The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.
Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.
So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.
Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
And now Firefox.
Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
>What strikes me as odd is the decision to position itself as just another AI‑enabled web browser, picking a fight with big techs and better‑funded startups whose users are less hostile (and sometimes enthusiastic) about adding AI to web browsing.
By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.
These tabs will probably be similar to the tabs in browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity. And some people really do use these browsers. Perhaps this is Mozilla's chance to monetize. Give at least some users the opportunity to use this feature and pay Mozilla.
AI or not, feels like the focus in the past few years for the browser has been to do catch-up on the trendy feature rather than improving the core experiences.
TBF some of these features are also unique and something i cherish when browsing the web (e.g. container tabs). however, the devs must ask why every "new" browser is just a chromium fork in the end.
there should be a try to pivot to the core experience than feature parity to see if it actually brings more people over.
I wish these features were added as extensions that you could uninstall vs being baked in.
Mozilla will never be able to compete with Google, Microsoft or OpenAI - heck even Perplexity - for AI features in a browser. They shouldn't even try.
I've been test driving Waterfox and at this point I don't think I'll be going back.
Google has an "AI Overview" whenever you search for something, and this is probably what Mozilla wants to enable. I think your average person will find it useful.
Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.
If they did things right, it shouldn't matter. Default Firefox should be nothing but a browser, everything else should be an extension. And Mozilla should be beholden to the same restrictions every other extension developer is.
Nobody ever wants anything in Firefox, but in this case it’s probably especially true.
People want a lot of stuff in Firefox. However, people also seem to neatly bin all features into either "obviously necessary part of a web browser" and "obviously extraneous nonsense" when what they really mean is "things I personally want" and "things I personally don't want".
I do. I find the translation features useful
If I could get Firefox to perform searches on my behalf via the AI sidebar that would be amazing! Are you kidding me? YES I WANT THIS!
Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension—where I can pick which AI I'm using—then I'm all for it. I'll just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.
NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper grammar-checking AI too. That would be super useful. I'd love that!
Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.
I think it could be nice in the longer term, as AI gets better. Especially if it's local.
No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual websites, then we would actually be able to use the public internet.
It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though, but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a browser engine.
Personally I don't mind if the purpose is increased privacy and that the processing is done locally.
Some great examples are the local translation engine and I believe they also added or are in the process to add a small engine that can describe images and provide caption on-demand, which is a great step towards accessibility.
I’m currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I’m using Firefox as a daily driver for the first time in a decade.
While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…
It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.
They have Telemetry as well which is on by default - see under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" in the settings.
They could have saved all the Google money and built a huge non-profit foundation dedicated to making the best browser. Instead they spent it on C-suite salaries and idiotic side quests. This is the consequence.
For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be available when I need it as external loadable module (extension? plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as LibreWolf and others will remove that.
The only place I can think of where I might actually find AI useful but AI is simply not there yet is for the browser to analyze the page super quickly and remove junk - ads, analytics, cookie prompts, too much extra spacing, "AI mode" buttons, the microphone button on YouTube search, YouTube Shorts and community posts etc. Basically, I should be able to tell AI to remove something and it should be able to do it instantly.
The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.
AI in an open source project will be horrible. Proprietary AI services backed by billions, hiring top programming, back/front/ui talent lead by ambitious dreamers are already problematic at most limited. A bunch of loose free lancers in their night time are not the best team to prepare a responsible and competitive AI gateway.
I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
Heck yes, we want jt, can't imagine browsing without it.
It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of value.
Well maybe you lose your ability to focus or your sanity or your privacy but yeah.
"I want to liquefy my brain on short form video" is quite a take.
So you can get 10x the brain damage in the same amount of time. This is not a great case.
I’d love an ai I could ask to pull up a web page I have a scattered memory of - I know what it was about but not the name of the site it was from, not if it’s open in a tab or if I closed it an hour ago, or maybe I bookmarked it. Even better if I can ask things like “can you find that movie review about some robert Downey junior film I read maybe a month ago?”
Whether it will actually do any of those things is another question of course.
I think fewer and fewer people want Mozilla in their Firefox ;) Maybe we'll get a better non-profit organization make a Firefox fork at some point.
There is zero money in making a browser.
I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs at all).
I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.
I also wondered about this. Mozilla pushed out some AI buttons.
I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.
I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.
The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.
The built-in translate is nice. The LLM stuff I don't use, but as long as it's tucked away in its own sidebar I don't mind.
I can only speak for myself. I do not want yet more bloat added to applications. With that bloat comes more vulnerabilities, maybe intentional or otherwise. "Ooopsie did we leak your ______ to the world? Gosh, we're so sorry." Enough already, just be a web browser. Keep it simple with the only dependency being the site I am visiting.
Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of complaints.
I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.
I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.
Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.
Please make AI disappear altogether until I want it. No pop-ups, no floating "Help me..." in fields, no spinning flashing icons on toolbars. I submit feedback on all products that do this that I would like a way to turn it all off. AI is useful when I want it, otherwise it's just annoying and gets in my way.
They want to browse the internet, and really that means browse the three sites they care about. They aren't going to change their browser cause of AI capabilities, so ultimately it doesn't matter. It's like arguing over whether users want dark mode. Some do, it's not going to change market share meaningfully.
I looked at the top 25 grossing apps on iOS and Android. There is only one explicitly ai app and it’s the one that ran a Super Bowl commercial, ChatGPT. I don’t see the demand from regular consumers. When or if it grosses top in the charts then it arrived. It’s more windows 3.0 than windows 95.
If it's really hidden in its own special tab and NEVER comes out unwanted, I can see some benefits.
It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue. Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my data the product.
Meanwhile a badly behaving page doesn't just maim the tab content area but freezes the whole browser. I've been using Firefox because my Chrome install got borked so I've used that to try giving FF a real try. I feel like I regularly have to get it out of my way. Maybe fix the browser first.
I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.
HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).
The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.
I've been a Firefox user for 5 years or so and I can tell you: yes no one needs AI in Firefox especially that Firefox users tend to be on the privacy conscious side of things
But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share, and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?
Lots of people saying things like, "This is not novel; come up with new ways to use this technology!" as if that's easy.
Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!
While back I figured I should support mozilla and I signed up for their VPN. It worked for a while but it felt like a hacky ad-on ontop of mulvad and then it just wouldn't work a lot of the time and I gave up.
I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.
I couldn't disagree more. I want responsible AI and i would expect Mozilla to lead the way on how to do this when it comes to browsers (they were pioneers when it came to containers and privacy control).
Here's some ways I can think of:
- seamless integration with local models
- opt in and opt out experience when needed
- ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)
- ai and accessibility
these are off the top of my head.
it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.
I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and short sighted.
Excited to see the all the security issues with the AI features leaking data in regular browser mode
> They’re calling it “Window AI.”
Was this intentional or just a complete lack of attention to detail? Even their own screenshot contradicts this.
Does it matter? Yes. "Window AI" suggests there is an AI manager, where as "AI Window" suggests an isolated environment.
People say Mozilla should try to make Firefox better to steal back usage from Chrome and then they say stuff like "nobody want AI in Firefox". Like it or not, AI it's here and if you want your browser to reach more users some AI will be required.
I really hope Mozilla open their eyes and ears and LISTEN to their USERS... no one wants AI in Firefox, all we want is a better web browser.
Mozilla, you are still on time to reroute your efforts to regain the users you'd lost by crap like this.
I want as little AI in my life as possible, and I certainly want zero of it forced on me.
At first I thought it was a bit tragic how Apple kinda fumbled AI. Now I think maybe they might have an edge if they were to be one of the only big companies not trying to push it into their products. Especially MacOS.
Muito bom ver um texto de um Brasileiro em numero 1 aqui! Parabéns Rodrigo!
Based on how many of these are there now, it's obvious some people want these features. I don't know the numbers, but some people obviously do want to chat with their browser now.
Google approached this the right way. No, not with "ai mode", that sucks. With the Chrome dev tools MCP. You allow AI to control the browser if the user opts-in and sets it up.
Contrarian here. I've fell in love with Firefox's AI Chatbox sidebar. It's extremely helpful to have Gemini immediately available to help with translating and summarizing text.
"nobody"... of the vocal ones.
Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could affect much more than just privacy.
Clearly it's not, "nobody."
But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent releases.
You can't be all things to all people.
The onus is on FireFox to deliver "the killer feature". No killer feature, nobody will bother with it. Mozilla needs to shift into entrepreneurial innovation.
I want a browser to prioritize speed, standards, stability and security.
All other features should come via add-ons.
Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.
What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.
The only people who want AI in anything are AI companies...
if my car comes with the ability to start normally but also an alternate mode where, by deisgn, it explodes and kills my entire family is that providing me with freedom of choice in my automobile experience? am I in control because I have the option to do things I would never under any circumstances actually want to do? or is someone trying to convince me that i'm in charge because I get to pick from a menu they wrote?
The sidebar where I can integrate my own locally hosted LLM? So I can quickly grab summaries and stuff? THAT'S helpful. The rest, get the hell away.
Got to hold on just for a few more months until Ladybird release. Servo, hopefully will be still catching up. Worst case scenario - move to Dillo.
Unfortunately there’s no winning for Mozilla.
Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the current state of “AI” and where it’s headed, the undeniable fact is that “AI” has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has had more than a few over the years).
What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It’s not easy. I’d rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail instead of just being left behind due to inaction.
I like having more options and AI is just one more option.
I get that Mozilla's trying to stay relevant in a changing landscape, but maybe listening to their core users is the competitive edge
i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely different UI after all this time.
Doesn't torbrowser use firefox? I wonder how a journalist could trust it if there's some obscure llm/ai involved?
Torbrowser is a fork of Firefox, not a user. I'm not going to bother looking this up because pigs aren't flying yet, so I'll just state it as fact: the torbrowser fork does not include any of Firefox's AI code or functionality.
Boy am I excited for the Ladybird alpha release. We won't have to deal with Chromium browsers, Safari, or Firefox anymore.
We're quickly moving from AI being a work helper to being the worst distraction of all times! Why Mozilla, why?
Can't wait for the Ladybird to arrive.
> Mozilla, after all, likely has a clearer view of the whole user base.
This assertion is relying on facts not in evidence.
I've tried the Perplexity browser and... I can't figure out what it does or how it is better?
I wouldn't mind being able to quickly ask an llm about the page I'm browsing or some text I select.
Serious question: to what end? I'm pretty adept at skimming text and honing in on things of interest. I have also spent years in academic and professional environments developing those skills, so I genuinely may not understand some common use cases.
I can see this if you're looking over something and don't know what it is. Highlight it and right-click or whatever and ask the AI to give you a quick summary. Similar to how wikipedia links will show enough in the preview to get an idea what it might be.
In a typical corporate environment, you cannot assume the recipient of an email will read past the first sentence, maybe not even the subject line. A vast number of people simply do not read. They can but they don’t.
Nono, I want AI in my browser, I put chatgpt.com on the address bar, and I get AI in my browser.
I want AI in Firefox. Blog disproven.
I think using AI to adjust the salience landscape of a web page (aka ad blocking) would be welcomed.
I wouldn't mind an AI ad-blocker. I just don't want it to futz with the actual content.
I want to pull in AI on my own terms and don't want to feel I am constantly watched.
How much is BigAI paying Moz to integrate these things? I has to be about the dollar surely?
I use Firefox Developer Edition as my daily driver and it's a nice experience. I think there's an AI option in the settings I have turned off? Wolud
I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a bit more over time.
My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.
Unless the AI in a browser can delete all ads for me, I don't want it.
Lots of commenters replying with 'actually some people want this', or 'actually I want this'.
Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that when mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI integration in the browser. That at least indicates that the people who are actively following firefox development are substantially against this kind of feature. It's not just "I and the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important subset of firefox power users don't want it.
In other words, the people that are actively going out of their way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based on having access to such things... to which I say... really??? But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who will choose firefox over whatever corporate-captured competitor is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.
Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some other commenters, is that, whether or not people do want this, they shouldn't want it. It is bad for users and for the world to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.
It is just a question of how long can Mozilla hold its ground with useless initiatives like this which are not what their core user base wants.
Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on those core products.
Features that theyd be more dignified to offer as plugins if they had it.
I don't want AI to have any of my data. Past, present or future.
> I think nobody wants AI in Firefox
I think the author does not speak for me
What, of course we do?
Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating research sessions, by searching and organizing...
I want it, but I have ideas in mind that aren’t just a chat window bolted to a browser.
Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.
We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.
I'm tired of software getting out of its lane. For an OS, I just want it to run shit. For a browser, load web shit. Why does it need to do AI?
Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.
I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.
Publishers are using AI to generate pages. I want AI to extract the worthwhile bits. Why shouldn't users have tools too?
why not? chatGPT frontend/ux is terrible, there should be thousands of alternatives
I don't think ai (or whatever features) is a bad thing unless it's on your way or designed to do damage to you (hey, I am saying you, Microsoft, get off your onedrive and copilot bullshit. I really don't need it to eat my network and memory when I absolutely don't want it).
Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.
why not AI integrations that are not built-in but rather externalized like LSP?
we respect your privacy, except for when we dump it into a publicly shared LLM
All Mozilla cares about is how to slurp your data. They are just a unit of Google with a different name.
i do
ChatGPT Atlas, anyone?
I meant what were they expecting? A bunch of their privacy-wonk userbase to go "Oh shit; I'm finally gonna go all-in on the slop now that Mozilla's doing AI?"
Like, what were they thinking?
I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.
A more cynical take/question: is Mozilla just pursuing these initiatives because their corporate sponsors need to push AI everywhere they can to justify their burn, in the hopes that a profitable use case eventually arises with a sufficient user base accustomed to the technology to pay for it?
Maybe there are people higher up with a lot of money who force these features. At the end of the day, the builders have the obey.
I want AI in VSC as an assistant, but that's it.
If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time ago.
Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might pay for YT if they did that.
Yeah, I think there's a market for suppressing AI slop.
would be funny if openAI couldn't turn a profit but somebody could suppressing it
Lol.
> Could Not Give Kudos
>Kudos could not be given to the message for the following reason: > Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed messages per minute.
Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.
I would prefer that contenteditable divs with multi-line contents would handle newlines in a consistent manner instead of the chaotic mess we have now. But I guess that doesn't pump stock valuations so AI slop it is.
I don’t want AI in my browser. I don’t want AI in my thermostat app. I don’t want AI showed into my face on every website I land.
It honestly feels like a plague worse than ads. At least ads I can block in various ways.
AI as a word now even puts me off. Every podcast ad read, every news story, every linkedin post. It’s exhausting
I can’t roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like “How can agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?”
I think they're damned if they do ("who the fuck wants AI in everything") and damned if they don't ("Mozilla is so irrelevant they didn't even tried the AI race")
It's a browser. A browser does not need AI baked in. Extensions/addons? Sure, go for it, the more the merrier. But forcing it on people was always going to be a daft move, especially for Mozilla who have completely lost their whole "We're not as bad as Google" schtick over the last few years.
I don't want AI anywhere, but it seems I cannot open any of my familiar applications without having to stumble over their new, stupid "AI" button. It has become quite infuriating.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure I want AI in my browser, whatever that may mean, but I don't think everyone shares my view. To think otherwise is IMHO delusional.
> We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and more profitable for us because we can sell your data!
Fixed that for you greed dbags.
M
Actually, AI in edge is not bad.
Ugh I hate it. The amount of times I accidentally trigger the ui to summarize the page is so annoying
Fuck, AI slop is literally everywhere. You need to go really deep to avoid it these days.
I mean, 52 people is a significant proportion of Mozilla's entire userbase, so...
I hate it when authors claim to speak for everyone.
AI = local = cool
AI = cloud = insecure bullshit
I think the underlying motivation here is that employees at Mozilla want to deliver big projects to get promoted / recognized / advance their careers. The fundamental "cause" for the misanthropic behavior is a perverse incentive structure. In my head I associate it with the "OKR" framework: when you're evaluated on "delivering recognizable projects" (regardless of value; it benefits everybody to pretend they have value) instead of "doing your job well" (whatever it is, whether glamorous or not) then you end up with bizarre corporate behaviors like this.
It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if they can invent recognizable deliverables, because the whole chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting / hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from everyone else also pretending.
But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even likes it.
None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so much free money going around. If you have to do an actually good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment, you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress the board/executives/big donors.
The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.
(Probably there are a few other things driving this framework also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as clueless about what makes software good for the users as everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have to to keep their jobs.)
This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS. But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh. And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it and for some reason that works because for mysterious and probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that either.
Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so disappointing.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
What does "jeetcoded" mean?
A racist play on vibecoding with the popular ethnic slur "pajeet." Thus the cowering behind a fresh account.
Thanks, but now I wish I hadn't asked. :(
[flagged]
counterpoint: I want AI in firefox
there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?
Based on the main demographic that normally jumps to Firefox, it would at least be a good idea for them to make the features opt in rather than opt out. Most of this stuff is on by default.
I'm curious about what you think AI would do for those features? I've never had issues with ads after just installing stock uBlock Origin, and local translation is already available and works great for me across the web. I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping. Are you envisioning having 100+ tabs and then telling an AI assistant to sort it all out for you?
> good idea for them to make the features opt in
true, but that's not the same as "nobody wants AI"; them fucking it up once shouldn't mean that they should drop the entire idea; by this logic they should stop making browsers altogether
the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu
> local translation is already available
and it's already "AI"
> I'm not sure what AI would do for tab grouping ...
they already have a "suggest more tabs" thing that does exactly this using a local model; it's insanely slow, low quality, doesn't use gpu, but the idea is nice. I'm hoping they will continue working on it, as managing tabs across multiple windows is not exactly what I want to spend my time on, and it's exactly the type of a problem LLMs are perfect for
> never had issues with ads
it could always be better; there's always a certain amount of sites that either don't work at all or still show ads, and I imagine you could use a local VLM to hide elements based on the actual rendered result; same with cookie banners, annoying sign-in prompts, and so on -- how is this not the coolest thing ever? as long as you have like 8gb (v/u)ram, you could immediately unshittify most of the web
AI is unfortunately an umbrella term which people can project what they want on to. For reasonable people like yourself it's a tool to accomplish tasks. While for someone else it might be CoPilot showing up frequently and they don't disable or turn off the notifications and just get continually frustrated.
so why not give mozilla the benefit of the doubt? why assume that it's necessarily gonna be a slopfest? I'm not exactly optimistic, but it could be good, I do want those features, and I'm not gonna switch to something like chrome
I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like response. I tire of all these interfaces.
What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead, you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly LLM agents).
eventually, but that's going to take a decade at this rate... no one has a voice assistant that can actually do anything worthwhile beyond than flip some light switches
right now we could get a browser that understands what's on the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user experience
I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd rather AI handle it
try asking a person?
society has clearly moved on beyond "pay a person to do it" so if I can talk to something that can understand language well enough to do tasks on my behalf that's what I have to take
yuck.
[dead]
I do all the time, I went to a restaurant the other day and had to ask for a physical menu instead of using an app.
I can't get pizza delivered without using an app.
When I go to a pharmacy, a person tells me to get my meds by putting my information into an app they used to replace the person at the register.
When I go get coffee, my order is in the mix with a dozen people who ordered via an app... I can't get priority despite being literally right there waiting.
We've apparently given up on hiring people for various tasks, so at least give me an app that understands what I ask it instead of funneling me through some "user experience" that differs for every single thing I do.
Firefox is dead. You need an insurmountable amount of configuration to even make it bearable and there is non-user respecting settings and telemetry everywhere. Ads, too. It's not something you can recommend, every site is broken and Mozilla rather likes to spend it's money on [1] discouraging human translators and [2] giving people free coffee on "Browser Raves" in Berlin instead. It's a shadow of its former self.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/DPn_Re5AAkN/
> every site is broken
If a site is broken, it's likely due to blocking of trackers. In the URL bar, click on the shield icon and disable the slider "Enhanced Tracking Protection". But yeah, that can be annoying.
Google is an advertising company. I don't understand choosing to use their browser if you can avoid it.
Mozilla is an advertising company too. In terms of breakage, Im talking about more fundamental things like missing APIs and wrong rendering.