“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.”
The more AI is being pushed into my face, the more it pisses me off.
Mozilla could have made an extension and promote it on their extension store. Rather than adding cruft to their browser and turning it on by default.
The list of things to turn off to get a pleasant experience in Firefox is getting longer by the day. Not as bad as chrome, but still.
Switching to de-Mozilla’d Firefox (Waterfox) is as simple as copying your profile folder from FF to WF. Everything transfers over, and I mean everything. No mozilla corp, no opting out of shit in menus at all.
Hey all, just a reminder to keep the community rules in mind when commenting on this thread. Criticism in any direction is fine, but please maintain your civility and don’t stoop to ad-hominem etc. Thanks.
don’t stoop to ad-hominem
At this point Ad-hominem is practically the nice name for the business model “enshitification”.
Why not just distribute a separate build and call it “Firefox AI Edition” or something? Making this available in the base binary is a big mistake. At least doing so immediately and without testing the waters.
I think ive lost hope at this point to see AI being actually useful in any application except chat gpt and code editors.
Companies are struggling how to use Ai in their products because it actually doesnt improve their product, but they really really want it to.
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Studies show it’s not useful for that either.
It does have applications in doing and excusing warcrimes, and panopticon bullshit.
Doesn’t matter what the end-user wants. Corporate greed feeding into technological ignorance is gonna shove it down our throats anyway
I am not really liking AI , sure its good for somethings but in last 2 weeks i seen some very negative and destructive outcomes from AI . I am so tired of everything being AI . It can have good potential but what are risks to users experience?
What things is it good for?
Genuinely good for?
Edit: being downvoted, but nobody has an answer, do they?
Basically everything its used for that isn’t being shoved in your face 24/7.
- speech to text
- image recognition
- image to text (includes OCR)
- language translation
- text to speech
- protein folding
- lots of other bio/chem problems
Lots of these existed before the AI hype to the point they’re taken for granted, but they are as much AI an LLM or image generator. All the consumer level AI services range from annoying to dangerous.
Is it actually both good and efficient for that crap, though? Or is it just capable of doing it?
Is it efficient at simulating protein folding, or does it constantly hallucinate impossible bullshit that has to be filtered out, burning a mountain and a lake for what a super computer circa 2010 would have just crunched through?
Does the speech to text actually work efficiently? On a variety of accents and voices? Compared to the same resources without the bullshit machine?
I feel like i need to ask all these questions because there are so many cultists out there contriving places to put this shit. I’m not opposed to a huge chunky ‘nuclear option’ for computing existing, I just think we need to actually think before we burn the kinds of resources this shit takes on something my phone could have done in 2017.
All of the AI uses I’ve listed have been around for almost a decade or more and are the only computational solutions to those problems. If you’ve ever used speech to text that wasn’t a speak-n-spell you were using a very basic AI model. If you ever scanned a document and had the text be recognized, that’s an AI model.
The catch here is I’m not talking about chatgpt or anything trying be very “general”. These are all highly specialized ai models that serve a very specific function.
a decade or more
Okay so not this trash that everyone’s going all-in on right now and building extra coal plants to power.
So, will there be an option to disable it?
Yes, and they push it less than tab groups and PWA. This is a nothingburger.
ai can be good as long as you don’t let it think for you. i think the problem is taking resources from development and building into a browser would could just be a bookmark to a webpage.
why don’t they just instead put vivaldi’s web panel sidebar into firefox so you can just add chatgpt or whatever as a web panel. i think that would be infinitely more useful (and can be used for other sites other than ai assistants).
Don’t they already have that last thing you mentioned?
it’s an addon but not baked in (not to the point like vivaldi where you can add any web panel as a url and have it display in the sidebar)
I’ve actually flipped on this position - but before you pull out your pitchforks and torches, please listen to what I have to say.
Do we want mass surveillance through SaaS? No. Do we want mass breach of copyright just because it’s a small holder and not some giant publisher - I.e “rules for thee” type vibe? Hell no. But do we throw the baby out with the bath water? Also: heck no. But let’s me underline a few facts.
- AI currently requires power greedy chips that also don’t utelize memory effectively enough
- Because of this it’s relegated to massive, globe heating infrastructure
- SaaS will always, always track you and harvest your data
- Said data will be used in marketing and psy-ops to manipulate you, your children and your community
- The more they track, the better their models become, which they’ll keep under lock and key
- More and more devices are coming with NPUs and TPUs on-chip
- That is the hardware has not caught up to the software yet
See where I’m going with this?
Add to the fact that people like their chatbots and can even learn to use them responsibly, but as long as they’re feeding the corpos, it’ll be used against them. Not only that, but in true silicon valley fashion, it’ll be monopolized.
The libre movement exists to bring power back to the user by fighting these conditions. It’s also a very good idea to standardize things so that it’s not hidden behind a proprietary API or service.
That’s why if Mozilla seeks to standardize locally run AI models by way of the browser, then that’s a good thing! Again; not if they’re feeding some SaaS.
But it their goal and their implementation is to bring models to the general consumer so that they can seize the means of computing, then that’s a good thing!
Again, if you’d rather just kick up dust and bemoan the idiocy and narcissistic nature of Silicon Valley, then you’ve already given them what they want - that they, and they alone, get to be the sole proprietaries of AI that is standardized. That’s like giving the average user over to a historically predatory ilk who’d rather build an autocracy than actually innovate.
Mozilla can be the hero we need. They can actually focus on consumer hardware, to give people what they want WITHOUT mass tracking and data harvesting.
That is if they want to. I’m not saying they’re not going to bend over, but they need the right kind of push back. They need to be told “local AI only - no SaaS” and then they can focus on creating web standards for local AI, effectively becoming the David to Silicon Valleys Goliath.
I know this is an unpopular opinion and I know the Silicon Valley barons are a bunch of sociopaths with way too much money, but we can’t give them monopoly over this. That would be bad!! We need to give the power to the user, and that means standardization!
Take it from an old curmudgeon. I’ve shook my fist at the cloud, I’ve read a ton of EULAs and I’ve opposed many predatory practices. But we need to understand that the user wants what the user wants. We can’t stick our heads in the sand and just repeat “AI bad” ad nauseum. We need to mobilize against the central giants.
We need a local AI movement and Mozilla could be in the forefront of this, if it weren’t for the pushback and outright cynicism people trevall generally (and justifiably) have - but we can’t let these cretinous bastards hold all the AI cards.
We need libre AI, and we need it now!
Thank you for your consideration.
When I want AI, I use this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1
My worry about AI built into my browser is that it’ll be turned into data mining, training, and revenue generation resulting in exploitation and manipulation of me.
My worry about AI built into my browser is that it’ll be turned into data mining, training, and revenue generation
Isn’t the AI Mozilla is talking about all run locally?
I’ll be honest, I do not know, but I’m always more worried about where it’ll end-up over where it is right now. Even if it is all local for now, it is a small tweak for that to change. Just a small decision by a few people and everything changes. I don’t have enough trust to believe that decision won’t be made.
Can I just take my Firefox Profile directory, and copy it over to LibreWolf? Does anybody know?
I wouldn’t. Part of how LibreWolf works is that it makes extensive changes to a new profile, just copying your profile over kinda defeats the object.
The best way is to export your bookmarks and cookies from Firefox (there are add-ons that can help if you don’t know how) and then import them into LibreWolf.
Also, if you use Firefox to store your passwords, you should export those too, and keep them somewhere safer. The browser’s an obvious target and LibreWolf disables password storage by default for that reason. KeePassXC is what I use but use whatever works for you.
Makes sense. But they change “just” the default settings, right? I would like to take over my existing profile if it works. To me it does not defeat the purpose, because I did a lot of custom tweaking to make it more private too. So from that perspective I am happy and that is not the reason why I change. I change because I’m fed up with the Ai integration of Firefox.
Edit: But maybe its also time for a fresh start from scratch. And rethink every detail again. I am very hesitant to make the switch right now… but it has to be done.
If you’re comfortable with your current privacy settings (no desire for LW’s hardened approach) and just want to ditch Mozilla corp, Waterfox is the fork for you.
What about your profile, other than your bookmarks and cookies, do you want to keep?
It definitely works that way for Waterfox. LibreWolf has very stringent privacy-focused defaults (like disabling form autofill and purging history and cache on every browser close), so unless you want to manually find all those settings and about:configs you’ll be overwriting with a migrated FF profile folder you’re kinda defeating the main purpose of using LW over WF. Same for if you were gonna disable the potentially “annoying” privacy defaults in LW.
Oh, the people who give them money want it.
And they value their opinion more then everyone else’s
Well if they do I’ll just switch to whatever browser that doesn’t.
They’re really trying to shove this down our throats aren’t they?
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
I don’t really see AI and LLMs as a solution there. Things that disrupt are typically ads or other capitalist nonsense. What are they thinking and how will AI help?
