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Translation? Image search? Live captions? Dubbing? Summary? Rewrite text better?
by high_na_euv 10mo ago
Translation?
Image search?
Live captions?
Dubbing?
Summary?
Rewrite text better?
- cosmic_cheese 10mo agoSafari does most of this by leveraging system-level AI features, some of which are entirely local (and in turn, can be and do get used elsewhere throughout the system and native apps). This model makes a lot more sense to me than building the browser around an LLM.
- freehorse 10mo agoFirefox uses local models for translation, summarisation and possibly other stuff. As it is not restricted on one platform, I guess that it has to use its own tools, while apple (or macos/ios focused software in general) can use system level APIs. But the logic I guess is the same.
- bastardoperator 10mo agoAll those things we had before AI?
- criddell 10mo agoMost of those things weren't very good before AI was applied. Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.
- mort96 10mo agoGoogle Translate isn't what's meant when tech CEOs say "AI" in 2025.
- johannes1234321 10mo agoWhat tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important. Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.
- jorvi 10mo agoGoogle Translation never "became very good" and it still isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi. Where it excels is quantity. Often, niche languages are only available on Google Translate.
- criddell 10mo agoGoogle Translate became very good compared to what came before it. Other stuff is better now and one day we will say the tools of today are trash.
- jorvi 10mo agoNo, even when they switched to machine learning their translations still made mistakes that would have made you look goofy. And even today their models still make mistakes that are just weird. It is especially baffling because Google has much better data sets and much more compute than their competitors.
- amrocha 10mo agoStop blurring the lines, google translate using machine learning has nothing to do with turning firefox into an ai browser
- nani8ot 10mo agoIt has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.
- amrocha 10mo agoIf that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers if he planned on maintaining the current features and approach, would he?
- zamadatix 10mo agoMany of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).
- lenerdenator 10mo agoTechnically, many of those things often were AI. They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI". But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.
- amrocha 10mo agoYes, tools have used machine learning, nobody is questioning or denying that. But that’s not what the CEO of mozilla means when he says he will turn Firefox into an AI browser. It means there will be stupid fucking LLMs shoved in your face.
- dotancohen 10mo ago> Translation? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my PDF viewer and Office viewer as well. > Image search? Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature. > Live captions? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC as well. > Dubbing? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC as well. > Summary? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my PDF viewer and Office viewer as well. > Rewrite text better? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my PDF viewer and Office viewer as well.
- esafak 10mo agoSo you're not going to get it until your OS decides to, and if its implementation is poor you're SOL?
- smaudet 10mo agoNot at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy. As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is something they will accept, at least with a mission statement like they have.
- dotancohen 10mo agoChoose the implementation that you like, or contribute to help make one better. Just like all other software on your computer. Don't like Libreoffice's implementation of Word support? Install Koffice. I take it you've never installed non-OEM software on your computer?
- dpark 10mo agoWhy would anyone install Koffice when clearly they would wait for the OS to support Word directly?
- iAMkenough 10mo ago
- avazhi 10mo agoTranslate sure. Image search? I have a search engine for that. Live captions? Didn’t ask for that, wouldn’t use it. Dubbing? Ditto. Summary? Wouldn’t trust an AI for that, plus it’s just more tik-tokification. No fucking thanks. I don’t need to experience life as short blips of everything. Rewrite text better? Might as well kill myself once I’m ready to let a predictive text bot write shit in my place. So… no thanks.
- homarp 10mo agoLocal RAG on your browsed pages (either automatically, manually or a mix (allow/disallow domains/url) ?
- homarp 10mo agolocal LLM assisted 'tampermonkey' userscript generation?
- godelski 10mo ago> Image search? I have a search engine for that. I'd use it. Why does it need to be another site? I'd trust Mozilla more than I trust Google. Do you really feel different? Plus, Search by Image[0] is one of the most popular extensions, with 3x as many people using it as tree-style tabs. I don't use it but a grammar tool is the next most popular[1], so I could see this being quite a useful feature. But the other stuff, I'm with you. I like translate but I personally don't care for dubbing, summarizing, or anything else. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetool/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetool/
- avazhi 10mo agoBut that’s exactly my point - addons already solve these problems without baking them in natively. Adding AI just creates bloatware/privacy/security/maintenance problems that are already solved by users being able to customise the browser for their own needs.
- mitthrowaway2 10mo agoI get very annoyed by generative AI, but to be fair I could imagine an AI-powered "Ctrl+F" which searches text by looser meaning-based matches, rather than strict character matches; for example Ctrl+AI+F "number of victims" in a news article, or Ctrl+AI+F "at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart. Or searching for text in images with OCR. Or searching my own browsing history for that article about that thing.
- mrguyorama 10mo ago>"at least 900 W" when sorting through a list of microwave ovens on Walmart. Newegg has that as a built in filter. Why do you people keep insisting I "need" an LLM to do things that are standard features? I find shopping online for clothes to suck, but there's nothing an LLM can do to fix that because it's not a magic machine and I cannot try on clothes at home. So instead, I just sucked it up and went to Old Navy. Like, these things are still lying to my face every single day. I only use them when there's no alternative, like quickly porting code from python to Java for an emergency project. Was the code correctly ported? Nope, it silently dropped things of course, but "it doesn't need to be perfect" was the spec. >Or searching for text in images with OCR. That thing that was a mainline feature of Microsoft OneNote in 2007 and worked just fine and I STILL never used? I thought it was the neatest feature but even my friend who runs everything out of OneNote doesn't use it much. Back in middle school we had a very similar Digital Notebook application that predates OneNote with a similar feature set, including the teachers being able to distribute Master copies of notes for their students, and I also did not use OCR there. The ONE actual good use case of LLMs that anyone has offered me did not come from techbros who think "Tesla has good software" is not only an accurate statement but an important point for a car, it came from my mom. Turns out, the text generation machine is pretty good at generating text in French to make tests! Her moronic (really rich of course, one of the richest in the state) school district refused to buy her any materials at all for her French classes, so she's been using ChatGPT. It does a great job, because that's what these machines are actually built for, and she only has to fix up the output occasionally, but that task is ACTUALLY easy to verify, unlike most of the things people use these LLMs for. She STILL wouldn't pay $20 monthly for it. That shouldn't be surprising, because "Test generator" for a high school class is a one time payment of $300 historically, and came with your textbook purchase. If she wasn't planning on retiring she would probably just do it the long way. A course like that is a durable good.
- dangus 10mo agoExactly. There’s doom and gloom in this thread but the truth is that the early adopters who are using AI-integrated browsers love them. Mozilla having unique features is what made it popular in the first place (tabbed browsing versus IE6).
- amrocha 10mo agoI’m not exactly surprised that AI grifters that have probably bet all their life savings on nvidia “love” their AI browsers.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]