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No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

564 points by MrAlex94 10mo ago

almosthere 10mo ago
I do think dipping your toes into the future is worth it. If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. But I don't think this is any more dangerous than giving people a browser in the first place. They have already done enough to shoot themselves in the foot enough.
- MrAlex94 10mo ago
  I am more of a sceptic of AI in the context of a browser, than its general use. I think LLMs have great utility and have really helped push things along - but it’s not as if they’re completely risk free.
- smt88 10mo ago
  I don't mind Mozilla trying to make use of AI, but I'm also glad we have actual competition still. In many other areas, there are zero "no AI" options at all.
- Qem 10mo ago
  > If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. It's more likely it will try to kill us by talking depressed people into suicide and providing virtual ersatz boyfriends/girlfriends to replace real human relationships, what is a functional equivalent to cyber-neutering, given people can't have children by dating LLMs.
  - a24j 10mo ago
    Birth rates may fall for those who LLM made unemployable...
  - SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
    Just checking but… what if instead of cruel natural selection, we’ve largely eliminated threats like predators and starvation… but still by either necessity or accident are presented with a less cruel more subtle filter?
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Related: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491
clueless 10mo ago
This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI... [Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc
- csydas 10mo ago
  >We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025... it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think: - mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching - mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies - mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future
lerp-io 10mo ago
>A browser is meant to be a user agent, more specifically, your agent on the web. at this point it’s more so a sandbox runtime bordering an OS, but okay
zavec 10mo ago
I guess it's nice for non-technical people who don't know how to use `about:config` but beyond that I don't really see the need. Hopefully adding that extra layer of indirection doesn't mean the users will have to wait too long for security patches.
- ekr____ 10mo ago
  PSA (for the nth time): about:config is not a supported way of configuring Firefox, so if you tweak features with about:config, don't be surprised if those tweaks stop working without warning.
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    Mozilla tells you to use it so it so that seems supported enough to me (example: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...) That said, they're admittedly terrible about keeping their documentation updated, letting users know about added/depreciated settings, and they've even been known to go in and modify settings after you've explicitly changed them from defaults, so the PSA isn't entirely unjustified.
    - ekr____ 10mo ago
      Ugh. Because they also say: "Two other forms of advanced configuration allow even further customization: about:config preference modifications and userChrome.css or userContent.css custom style rules. However, Mozilla highly recommends that only the developers consider these customizations, as they could cause unexpected behavior or even break Firefox. Firefox is a work in progress and, to allow for continuous innovation, Mozilla cannot guarantee that future updates won’t impact these customizations." https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-advanced-customization-and-configuration https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-advanced-custom...
  - tim333 10mo ago
    Kind of an aside, I mostly use Chrome but I thought I'd give Firefox a go again, Everyone says use tree style tabs but I couldn't get them to display properly without going to about:config to enable custom css and creating a new css file somewhere deep in the file system. It's stuff like that that makes everyone use Chrome.
kevmo314 10mo ago
> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic. This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those AIs. Bergamot's model's behavior is no more or less auditable or a black box than an LLM's behavior. If you really want to go dig into a Llama 7B model, you definitely can. Even Bergamot's underlying model has an option to be transformer-based: https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/ https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/ The premise of non-corporate AI is respectable but I don't understand the hate for LLMs. Local inference is laudable, but being close-minded about solutions is not interesting.
- jazzyjackson 10mo ago
  It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it. I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I don't want my language to be pulled towards the average redditor, so I choose not to interact with LLMs (I still use them for code generation, but I wouldn't if I used code for self expression. I just refuse to have a back and forth conversation on any topic. It's like that family that tried raising a chimp alongside a baby. The chimp did pick up some human like behavior, but the baby human adapted to chimp like behavior much faster, so they abandoned the experiment.)
  - kevmo314 10mo ago
    Sure, I am more referring to advocating for Bergamot as a type of more "pure" solution. I have no opinion on not wanting to converse with a machine, that is a perfectly valid preference. I am referring more to the blog post's position where it seems to advocate against itself.
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
inkysigma 10mo ago
> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense. I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.
- Cheer2171 10mo ago
  No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs). From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable. Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.
  - koolala 10mo ago
    I'm ok with Translation because it's best solved with AI. I'm not ok with it when Firefox "uses AI to read your open tabs" to do things that don't even need an AI based solution.
deleted 10mo ago
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deleted 10mo ago
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someothherguyy 10mo ago
This feature can be easily disabled with policies: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#2209 https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profil... https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3684 https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/in...
- beached_whale 10mo ago
  Easy for who? 99% of people are not going/able to setup firefox policies.
  - someothherguyy 10mo ago
    More than 1% of humans can read and create a file on computer. Others know how to read and use a search engine, and way more can be instructed by a LLM on how to do so. I would say it is nearly as easy as installing waterfox or some other privacy focused fork of Firefox.
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  This is like when people defend Windows 11's nonsense by saying "you can disable or remove that stuff". Yes, you can. But you shouldn't have to, and I personally prefer to use tools which don't shove useless things into the tool because it's trendy.
  - calvinmorrison 10mo ago
    not to mention firefox routinely blows up any policies you set during upgrades, incompatibilities, and an endless about:config that is more opaque than a hunk of room temperature lard.
  - derekdahmer 10mo ago
    How is this different from linux? People happily spend hours customizing defaults in their OS. It’s usually a point of praise for open source software.
aag 10mo ago
Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?: > Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.
- Glant 10mo ago
  Presumably Google Disco, an experimental AI focused web browser. There's also a few related HN threads but not much discussion. https://labs.google/disco https://labs.google/disco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952
doubtfuly 10mo ago
On Windows Mozilla can't even handle disabling hardware acceleration, a.k.a. the GPU, from its settings page. Sure you can toggle the button but it doesn't work as verified in the task manager. What hope is there that they can be trusted to disable AI then? It's a feature that I'd never want enabled. When that "feature" comes out users will be forced to find a fork without the feature.
koolala 10mo ago
Did Firefox already add AI into Tabs? Today I just got my first 'Tab Grouping' and it says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". That's the worst way to do grouping ever... just group hierarchically based on where it opened from...
- Groxx 10mo ago
  Particularly since they clearly keep this info around - if you install TreeStyleTabs or Sideberry, you'll see it immediately show the historical-structure of your current tabs (in-process at least, I'm not 100% sure about after kill->restore). That info has to come from somewhere.
  - koolala 10mo ago
    I wish there was a Horizontal solution instead of vertical tabs. Maybe someone could mod their AI system with a non-AI backend.
Papazsazsa 10mo ago
[flagged]
- 627467 10mo ago
  i bet there's a big overlap between users of firefox and those who complain about humans being replaced with AI. so don't think its weird
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  It's not really weird that two different people say different things.
fguerraz 10mo ago
I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? Just like with Mozilla, they rely on sponsors and you are the product.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? What do you say about the following link, then? > https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/
  - Groxx 10mo ago
    New this year? https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozillafoundation.org/donate/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozi... I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...
  - AnonC 10mo ago
    That link is for Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit and donations to it do not go to the development of Firefox. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity, owns and manages Firefox. The way to support Firefox monetarily is by buying Mozilla VPN where available (this is Mullvad in the backend) and buying some Firefox merchandise (like stickers, t-shirts, etc.). I think an MDN Plus subscription also helps.
- AnonC 10mo ago
  As I mentioned in a comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 ), Firefox does not rely only on sponsors. There are a few ways to pay money that goes directly towards Firefox.
- benrutter 10mo ago
hexasquid 10mo ago
...and keep your hand up if you've ever donated to Firefox
- phyzome 10mo ago
  I gave them over $500 and I sure as hell will never do that again.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- atomicfiredoll 10mo ago
  Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page? Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now. People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.
koolala 10mo ago
How do you disable the telemetry in Waterfox? It looks like they get their funding because they partnered with an Ad company. Do I just need to change the default search?
- koolala 10mo ago
  https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-in-2023/ https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-in-2023/ Looks like their independent now, nice.
htx80nerd 10mo ago
I was a FF driver for ages and now making the switch to Chrome based browser simple because it's faster and websites are all tested against Chrome / Safari. I see both of these issues manifest IRL on a weekly basis. Why do I want to burn up CPU cycles and second using FF when Chromium is literally faster.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  I use FF because of uBlock Origin, and also because it has built-in support for SOCKS5 proxy connections, which I use to access stuff at work over an ssh tunnel.
  - webstrand 10mo ago
    Yeah per-tab container socks5 is a killer feature I use every day.
mmaunder 10mo ago
"...trust from other large, imporant [sic] third parties which in turn has given Waterfox users access to protected streaming services via Widevine." The black box objection disqualifies Widevine.
human_llm 10mo ago
Waterfox just released version 6.6.6. Are we sure it is not evil?
chauhankiran 10mo ago
With this, people will come here and the go. I mean consider the example of many GNU/Linux users I know who use GNU/Linux (or for them Linux means Ubuntu) system and can ask them to try out Waterfox. But, about installation - can't we have .deb? I know we can easily install from tarball and then setup the .desktop file and then adjust the icon to properly display, and what not...But, Can we make a bit simpler to try?
nirui 10mo ago
> Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you... Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future. > If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. This is basically their train of thought: provide something different for people who truly need it. There's nothing to criticize about. However, let's don't forget that other browsers can remove/disable AI features just as fast as they add them. If Waterfox wants to be *more than just an alternative* (a.k.a. be a competitor), they needs discover what people actually need and optimize heavily on that. But this is hard to do because people don't show their true motives. Maybe one day, it turned out that people do just want an AI that "think for them". That would be awkward, to say the least.
pdyc 10mo ago
how is adding ai chat different than asking search engine? I think mozilla wants to make sure that it gets some cut for sending queries to ai similar to their existing revenue model where they get cut for sending it to google. Similar to SE's users should have a choice to use any ai or not.
vivzkestrel 10mo ago
if kagi can make a search engine that charges users, why dont we have a 1$/month open source browser whose code can be verified but people pay to use monthly?
- benrutter 10mo ago
  I guess that wouldn't really "open source" in the traditional sense, but that's clearly a tangent. Personally, I'd love a paid for high quality browser that serves me rather than sneakily trying to get me to look at ads. I think the challenge is that a browser is an incredibly difficult and large thing to build and maintain. So there aren't many wholly new browsers in existence, and therefore not very many business models being tried out. Full agreement that I'd pay for such a thing- I have a browser and a terminal open non-stop during my workday. It's an important tool and I'd easily pay for a better offering if that was an option.
- speedgoose 10mo ago
  Would it be profitable without some heavy investments ? https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
- Orygin 10mo ago
  Paying to get a browser fork with less features? At that point, just pay $1 to Mozilla for firefox instead..
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    If they support it and have an incentive to listen to their customers and not shareholders, gladly. We can't keep using those logic of being afraid to invest then be mad when companies find someone who will.
SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago
I just downloaded WaterFox, it looks nice. When they say "AI browsers are proliferating." and "Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers." what does that mean? What's an "AI Browser", and are they really gaining significant market share? For what? I found this (1) that suggests that several "AI Browsers" exist, which is "proliferating" in a sense. 1) https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/ https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...
renegat0x0 10mo ago
A browser is a tool that allows you to browse the internet. It should be able to display HTML elements, and stuff. LLMs are also a tool, but it is not necessary for web browsing. It should be installed into a browser as extension, or integrated as such, so it should be quite easily enabled, or disabled. Surely it should not be intertwined with the browser in a meaningful way imho.
rythie 10mo ago
Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.
- benrutter 10mo ago
  That's true, but as a Waterfox user, I'm not worried! If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.
  - reddalo 10mo ago
    > I'll just find a new browser. The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome.
    - dragonwriter 10mo ago
      > The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome. Lynx is still not a re-skin of Chrome, unless I missed something changing.
      - fsflover 10mo ago
        Can you manage your bank in Lynx?
    - benrutter 10mo ago
      Yes, I agree. I suppose when I said "I'm not worried" - I meant in the context of "it doesn't put me off using Waterfox". I am worried from an overall software ecosystem point of view.
    - voshond 10mo ago
      Luckily there is ladybird in the making
zmmmmm 10mo ago
I just want FireFox to focus on building an absolutely awesome plugin API that exposes as much power and flexibility as possible - with the best possible security sandbox and permissions model to go with it. Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.
- sigmoid10 10mo ago
  I just want a browser that lets me easily install a good adblocker on all my operating systems. I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature, because I will probably just disable it immediately anyway. But the nr 1 thing I use every day on every single site I visit is an adblocker. I'm always baffled when people complain about ads on mobile or something, because I literally haven't watched ads in decades now.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    > I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature At some point Firefox added these gaps on the URL bar, every single time I install Firefox I have to go out of my way to delete the spacing, it drives me up a wall.
- pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
  They've been quite forceful in the past in pushing 'plugins' by integrating them and turning them on repeatedly when people turned them off. Did that achieve the last CEOs goals? Presumably if it did they'll use that route again. Have Google required a default 'on' for Gemini use?
- moffkalast 10mo ago
  I just want them to fix their goddamn rendering.
- LandR 10mo ago
  I just want an adblocker and tree style vertical tabs, where the tab bar minimises when the mouse isn't over it. That's literally my entire use case for using firefox.
rixed 10mo ago
I, for one, am dreaming of AI assisted ad removal, content summaries, bookmarks automatic classification...
graycat 10mo ago
As I read the post by MrAlex94, I noticed a remark that the browser Chrome is good as a user agent. To me, that's terrific! Looks like I'll have to consider Chrome again.` Here are what I find as reasons to scream about Mozilla: Popups: (a) Several times a day, my attention and concentration get interrupted by, for me, the unwelcome announcement that there is a new version I can download. A new version can have changes I don't like and genuine bugs. Sure, I could keep a copy of my favorite version from history, but that is system management mud wrestling and interruption of my work. (b) Now I get told several times a day that my computer and cell phone can share access to a Web page. In this action Mozilla covers up what that page was showing I wanted it to show. No thanks. When I'm at my computer, AMD 8 core processor, all my files and software tools, and 1 Gbps optical fiber connection to the Internet and looking at a Web page, I want nothing to do with a cell phone's presentation of a, that, Web page. (c) Some URLs are a dozen lines long and Mozilla finds ways to present such URLs with all their lines and pursue clearly their main objective -- cover up the desired content. Mozilla needs to make their covering up, changing, the screen optional or just eliminated. Want me to donate? You've mentioned as little as $10. Deal: Raise the $10 by a factor of 5 AND quit covering up my content and interrupting my work, and we've got a deal.
hansmayer 10mo ago
I completely agree with the main sentiment, which is - I want the browser to be a User Agent and nothing else. I don´t need a crappy, un-reliable intermediary between the already perfectly fine UA and the Internet.
krige 10mo ago
Also see related statement by vivaldi: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198 https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198
- stalfosknight 10mo ago
  That roadmap is luscious.
b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
I switched to Waterfox about a year ago because my poor old linux box just couldn't keep up with the latest Firefox version (especially the Snap package! I literally unusable for me) and I am very thankful that they aren't going to be including any of the LLM crud that Mozilla has been talking up. I get the utility that this stuff can have for certain types of activities but on top of not having great hardware to run the dang things, I just don't find any of the proposed use-cases that compelling for me personally. It's just nice that the totalizing self-insistence of AI tech hasn't gobbled up every corner of the tech space, even if those crevices and niches are getting smaller by the day.
otikik 10mo ago
> AI browsers are proliferating Are they, though? I get bombarded by AI ads very frequently and I have yet to see anything from those "AI browsers" mentioned on the article.
- viraptor 10mo ago
  https://www.perplexity.ai/comet https://www.perplexity.ai/comet https://chatgpt.com/atlas/ https://chatgpt.com/atlas/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode https://www.genspark.ai/browser https://www.genspark.ai/browser https://www.operaneon.com/ https://www.operaneon.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://fellou.ai/ https://fellou.ai/ And many many more...
  - Maxion 10mo ago
    Do they have any users, though?
    - viraptor 10mo ago
      Would you like to research this and tell us?
      - otikik 10mo ago
        I don't, but that was also my point: I don't care if new AI browsers pop up, if no one uses them they might not even exist. I didn't even know that AI browsers were even a thing until I read this article. And I work on AI.
    - tim333 10mo ago
      I downloaded the chatgpt one, tried it for a minute, thought meh, and went back to my usual browser. Does that count as a user?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
countWSS 10mo ago
The problem with this is integration: no one would complain if it was an official plugin/extension, but integrating this plugin into Firefox is forced and unexpected decision. Firefox telemetry,labs/experiments and server-dependent features will lose it marketshare slowly in favor of local-only browsers that don't have online dependencies or forced bloatware. Like many i've switched long ago to LibreWolf.
dumbfounder 10mo ago
“Even if you can disable individual AI features, the cognitive load of monitoring an opaque system that’s supposedly working on your behalf would be overwhelming.” 99.9% of people haven’t ever had one single thought about how their software works. I don’t think they will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. Quite the opposite.
insin 10mo ago
If people could get into the habit of using "AI*" when they explicitly mean "LLM" but they have to say "AI" because hype, that would be nice.
- tim333 10mo ago
  It gets complicated. The * leads to "* The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither." And Bergamot is also a transformer based language model.
kogasa240p 10mo ago
Good stuff. Bit unrelated but I am excited for the imminent wave of lightweight Servo based browsers, will finally let people break free from the Blink/Gecko duopoly.
Fairburn 10mo ago
Lets be real. As someone pointed out, browsers are black boxes, regardless of who made/forked a browser family. Unless you make it yourself, we will forever be a dog chasing its tail. I would love to believe in the best of whichever I choose. And use it according to my comfort level.

564 points by MrAlex94 10mo ago

I do think dipping your toes into the future is worth it. If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. But I don't think this is any more dangerous than giving people a browser in the first place. They have already done enough to shoot themselves in the foot enough.

MrAlex94 10mo ago
I am more of a sceptic of AI in the context of a browser, than its general use. I think LLMs have great utility and have really helped push things along - but it’s not as if they’re completely risk free.
smt88 10mo ago
I don't mind Mozilla trying to make use of AI, but I'm also glad we have actual competition still. In many other areas, there are zero "no AI" options at all.
Qem 10mo ago
> If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. It's more likely it will try to kill us by talking depressed people into suicide and providing virtual ersatz boyfriends/girlfriends to replace real human relationships, what is a functional equivalent to cyber-neutering, given people can't have children by dating LLMs.
- a24j 10mo ago
  Birth rates may fall for those who LLM made unemployable...
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
  Just checking but… what if instead of cruel natural selection, we’ve largely eliminated threats like predators and starvation… but still by either necessity or accident are presented with a less cruel more subtle filter?

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Related: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288491

clueless 10mo ago

This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI... [Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc

csydas 10mo ago
>We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025... it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think: - mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching - mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies - mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future

lerp-io 10mo ago

>A browser is meant to be a user agent, more specifically, your agent on the web. at this point it’s more so a sandbox runtime bordering an OS, but okay

zavec 10mo ago

I guess it's nice for non-technical people who don't know how to use `about:config` but beyond that I don't really see the need. Hopefully adding that extra layer of indirection doesn't mean the users will have to wait too long for security patches.

ekr____ 10mo ago
PSA (for the nth time): about:config is not a supported way of configuring Firefox, so if you tweak features with about:config, don't be surprised if those tweaks stop working without warning.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  Mozilla tells you to use it so it so that seems supported enough to me (example: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...) That said, they're admittedly terrible about keeping their documentation updated, letting users know about added/depreciated settings, and they've even been known to go in and modify settings after you've explicitly changed them from defaults, so the PSA isn't entirely unjustified.
  - ekr____ 10mo ago
    Ugh. Because they also say: "Two other forms of advanced configuration allow even further customization: about:config preference modifications and userChrome.css or userContent.css custom style rules. However, Mozilla highly recommends that only the developers consider these customizations, as they could cause unexpected behavior or even break Firefox. Firefox is a work in progress and, to allow for continuous innovation, Mozilla cannot guarantee that future updates won’t impact these customizations." https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-advanced-customization-and-configuration https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-advanced-custom...
- tim333 10mo ago
  Kind of an aside, I mostly use Chrome but I thought I'd give Firefox a go again, Everyone says use tree style tabs but I couldn't get them to display properly without going to about:config to enable custom css and creating a new css file somewhere deep in the file system. It's stuff like that that makes everyone use Chrome.

kevmo314 10mo ago

> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic. This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those AIs. Bergamot's model's behavior is no more or less auditable or a black box than an LLM's behavior. If you really want to go dig into a Llama 7B model, you definitely can. Even Bergamot's underlying model has an option to be transformer-based: https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/ https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/ The premise of non-corporate AI is respectable but I don't understand the hate for LLMs. Local inference is laudable, but being close-minded about solutions is not interesting.

jazzyjackson 10mo ago
It's not necessarily close minded to choose to abstain from interacting with generative text, and choose not to use software that integrates it. I could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I don't want my language to be pulled towards the average redditor, so I choose not to interact with LLMs (I still use them for code generation, but I wouldn't if I used code for self expression. I just refuse to have a back and forth conversation on any topic. It's like that family that tried raising a chimp alongside a baby. The chimp did pick up some human like behavior, but the baby human adapted to chimp like behavior much faster, so they abandoned the experiment.)
- kevmo314 10mo ago
  Sure, I am more referring to advocating for Bergamot as a type of more "pure" solution. I have no opinion on not wanting to converse with a machine, that is a perfectly valid preference. I am referring more to the blog post's position where it seems to advocate against itself.
- bee_rider 10mo ago

inkysigma 10mo ago

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense. I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.

Cheer2171 10mo ago
No, it is disqualifyingly clueless. The author defends one neural network, one bag of effectively-opaque floats that get blended together with WASM to produce non-deterministic outputs which are injected into the DOM (translation), then righteously crusades against other bags of floats (LLMs). From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable. Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.
- koolala 10mo ago
  I'm ok with Translation because it's best solved with AI. I'm not ok with it when Firefox "uses AI to read your open tabs" to do things that don't even need an AI based solution.

deleted 10mo ago

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someothherguyy 10mo ago

This feature can be easily disabled with policies: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#2209 https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profil... https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3684 https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/in...

beached_whale 10mo ago
Easy for who? 99% of people are not going/able to setup firefox policies.
- someothherguyy 10mo ago
  More than 1% of humans can read and create a file on computer. Others know how to read and use a search engine, and way more can be instructed by a LLM on how to do so. I would say it is nearly as easy as installing waterfox or some other privacy focused fork of Firefox.
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
This is like when people defend Windows 11's nonsense by saying "you can disable or remove that stuff". Yes, you can. But you shouldn't have to, and I personally prefer to use tools which don't shove useless things into the tool because it's trendy.
- calvinmorrison 10mo ago
  not to mention firefox routinely blows up any policies you set during upgrades, incompatibilities, and an endless about:config that is more opaque than a hunk of room temperature lard.
- derekdahmer 10mo ago
  How is this different from linux? People happily spend hours customizing defaults in their OS. It’s usually a point of praise for open source software.

aag 10mo ago

Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?: > Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.

Glant 10mo ago
Presumably Google Disco, an experimental AI focused web browser. There's also a few related HN threads but not much discussion. https://labs.google/disco https://labs.google/disco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952

doubtfuly 10mo ago

On Windows Mozilla can't even handle disabling hardware acceleration, a.k.a. the GPU, from its settings page. Sure you can toggle the button but it doesn't work as verified in the task manager. What hope is there that they can be trusted to disable AI then? It's a feature that I'd never want enabled. When that "feature" comes out users will be forced to find a fork without the feature.

koolala 10mo ago

Did Firefox already add AI into Tabs? Today I just got my first 'Tab Grouping' and it says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". That's the worst way to do grouping ever... just group hierarchically based on where it opened from...

Groxx 10mo ago
Particularly since they clearly keep this info around - if you install TreeStyleTabs or Sideberry, you'll see it immediately show the historical-structure of your current tabs (in-process at least, I'm not 100% sure about after kill->restore). That info has to come from somewhere.
- koolala 10mo ago
  I wish there was a Horizontal solution instead of vertical tabs. Maybe someone could mod their AI system with a non-AI backend.

Papazsazsa 10mo ago

[flagged]

627467 10mo ago
i bet there's a big overlap between users of firefox and those who complain about humans being replaced with AI. so don't think its weird
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
It's not really weird that two different people say different things.

fguerraz 10mo ago

I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? Just like with Mozilla, they rely on sponsors and you are the product.

deleted 10mo ago
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aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
> I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? What do you say about the following link, then? > https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/
- Groxx 10mo ago
  New this year? https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozillafoundation.org/donate/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.mozi... I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...
- AnonC 10mo ago
  That link is for Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit and donations to it do not go to the development of Firefox. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity, owns and manages Firefox. The way to support Firefox monetarily is by buying Mozilla VPN where available (this is Mullvad in the backend) and buying some Firefox merchandise (like stickers, t-shirts, etc.). I think an MDN Plus subscription also helps.
AnonC 10mo ago
As I mentioned in a comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297617 ), Firefox does not rely only on sponsors. There are a few ways to pay money that goes directly towards Firefox.
benrutter 10mo ago

hexasquid 10mo ago

...and keep your hand up if you've ever donated to Firefox

phyzome 10mo ago
I gave them over $500 and I sure as hell will never do that again.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
atomicfiredoll 10mo ago
Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page? Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now. People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.

koolala 10mo ago

How do you disable the telemetry in Waterfox? It looks like they get their funding because they partnered with an Ad company. Do I just need to change the default search?

koolala 10mo ago
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-in-2023/ https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-in-2023/ Looks like their independent now, nice.

htx80nerd 10mo ago

I was a FF driver for ages and now making the switch to Chrome based browser simple because it's faster and websites are all tested against Chrome / Safari. I see both of these issues manifest IRL on a weekly basis. Why do I want to burn up CPU cycles and second using FF when Chromium is literally faster.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
I use FF because of uBlock Origin, and also because it has built-in support for SOCKS5 proxy connections, which I use to access stuff at work over an ssh tunnel.
- webstrand 10mo ago
  Yeah per-tab container socks5 is a killer feature I use every day.

mmaunder 10mo ago

"...trust from other large, imporant [sic] third parties which in turn has given Waterfox users access to protected streaming services via Widevine." The black box objection disqualifies Widevine.

human_llm 10mo ago

Waterfox just released version 6.6.6. Are we sure it is not evil?

chauhankiran 10mo ago

With this, people will come here and the go. I mean consider the example of many GNU/Linux users I know who use GNU/Linux (or for them Linux means Ubuntu) system and can ask them to try out Waterfox. But, about installation - can't we have .deb? I know we can easily install from tarball and then setup the .desktop file and then adjust the icon to properly display, and what not...But, Can we make a bit simpler to try?

nirui 10mo ago

> Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you... Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future. > If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. This is basically their train of thought: provide something different for people who truly need it. There's nothing to criticize about. However, let's don't forget that other browsers can remove/disable AI features just as fast as they add them. If Waterfox wants to be *more than just an alternative* (a.k.a. be a competitor), they needs discover what people actually need and optimize heavily on that. But this is hard to do because people don't show their true motives. Maybe one day, it turned out that people do just want an AI that "think for them". That would be awkward, to say the least.

pdyc 10mo ago

how is adding ai chat different than asking search engine? I think mozilla wants to make sure that it gets some cut for sending queries to ai similar to their existing revenue model where they get cut for sending it to google. Similar to SE's users should have a choice to use any ai or not.

vivzkestrel 10mo ago

if kagi can make a search engine that charges users, why dont we have a 1$/month open source browser whose code can be verified but people pay to use monthly?

benrutter 10mo ago
I guess that wouldn't really "open source" in the traditional sense, but that's clearly a tangent. Personally, I'd love a paid for high quality browser that serves me rather than sneakily trying to get me to look at ads. I think the challenge is that a browser is an incredibly difficult and large thing to build and maintain. So there aren't many wholly new browsers in existence, and therefore not very many business models being tried out. Full agreement that I'd pay for such a thing- I have a browser and a terminal open non-stop during my workday. It's an important tool and I'd easily pay for a better offering if that was an option.
speedgoose 10mo ago
Would it be profitable without some heavy investments ? https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
Orygin 10mo ago
Paying to get a browser fork with less features? At that point, just pay $1 to Mozilla for firefox instead..
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  If they support it and have an incentive to listen to their customers and not shareholders, gladly. We can't keep using those logic of being afraid to invest then be mad when companies find someone who will.

SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago

I just downloaded WaterFox, it looks nice. When they say "AI browsers are proliferating." and "Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers." what does that mean? What's an "AI Browser", and are they really gaining significant market share? For what? I found this (1) that suggests that several "AI Browsers" exist, which is "proliferating" in a sense. 1) https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/ https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...

renegat0x0 10mo ago

A browser is a tool that allows you to browse the internet. It should be able to display HTML elements, and stuff. LLMs are also a tool, but it is not necessary for web browsing. It should be installed into a browser as extension, or integrated as such, so it should be quite easily enabled, or disabled. Surely it should not be intertwined with the browser in a meaningful way imho.

rythie 10mo ago

Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.

benrutter 10mo ago
That's true, but as a Waterfox user, I'm not worried! If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.
- reddalo 10mo ago
  > I'll just find a new browser. The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome.
  - dragonwriter 10mo ago
    > The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome. Lynx is still not a re-skin of Chrome, unless I missed something changing.
    - fsflover 10mo ago
      Can you manage your bank in Lynx?
  - benrutter 10mo ago
    Yes, I agree. I suppose when I said "I'm not worried" - I meant in the context of "it doesn't put me off using Waterfox". I am worried from an overall software ecosystem point of view.
  - voshond 10mo ago
    Luckily there is ladybird in the making

zmmmmm 10mo ago

I just want FireFox to focus on building an absolutely awesome plugin API that exposes as much power and flexibility as possible - with the best possible security sandbox and permissions model to go with it. Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.

sigmoid10 10mo ago
I just want a browser that lets me easily install a good adblocker on all my operating systems. I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature, because I will probably just disable it immediately anyway. But the nr 1 thing I use every day on every single site I visit is an adblocker. I'm always baffled when people complain about ads on mobile or something, because I literally haven't watched ads in decades now.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  > I don't care about their new toolbar or literally any other feature At some point Firefox added these gaps on the URL bar, every single time I install Firefox I have to go out of my way to delete the spacing, it drives me up a wall.
pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
They've been quite forceful in the past in pushing 'plugins' by integrating them and turning them on repeatedly when people turned them off. Did that achieve the last CEOs goals? Presumably if it did they'll use that route again. Have Google required a default 'on' for Gemini use?
moffkalast 10mo ago
I just want them to fix their goddamn rendering.
LandR 10mo ago
I just want an adblocker and tree style vertical tabs, where the tab bar minimises when the mouse isn't over it. That's literally my entire use case for using firefox.

rixed 10mo ago

I, for one, am dreaming of AI assisted ad removal, content summaries, bookmarks automatic classification...

graycat 10mo ago

As I read the post by MrAlex94, I noticed a remark that the browser Chrome is good as a user agent. To me, that's terrific! Looks like I'll have to consider Chrome again.` Here are what I find as reasons to scream about Mozilla: Popups: (a) Several times a day, my attention and concentration get interrupted by, for me, the unwelcome announcement that there is a new version I can download. A new version can have changes I don't like and genuine bugs. Sure, I could keep a copy of my favorite version from history, but that is system management mud wrestling and interruption of my work. (b) Now I get told several times a day that my computer and cell phone can share access to a Web page. In this action Mozilla covers up what that page was showing I wanted it to show. No thanks. When I'm at my computer, AMD 8 core processor, all my files and software tools, and 1 Gbps optical fiber connection to the Internet and looking at a Web page, I want nothing to do with a cell phone's presentation of a, that, Web page. (c) Some URLs are a dozen lines long and Mozilla finds ways to present such URLs with all their lines and pursue clearly their main objective -- cover up the desired content. Mozilla needs to make their covering up, changing, the screen optional or just eliminated. Want me to donate? You've mentioned as little as $10. Deal: Raise the $10 by a factor of 5 AND quit covering up my content and interrupting my work, and we've got a deal.

hansmayer 10mo ago

I completely agree with the main sentiment, which is - I want the browser to be a User Agent and nothing else. I don´t need a crappy, un-reliable intermediary between the already perfectly fine UA and the Internet.

krige 10mo ago

Also see related statement by vivaldi: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198 https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198

stalfosknight 10mo ago
That roadmap is luscious.

b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago

I switched to Waterfox about a year ago because my poor old linux box just couldn't keep up with the latest Firefox version (especially the Snap package! I literally unusable for me) and I am very thankful that they aren't going to be including any of the LLM crud that Mozilla has been talking up. I get the utility that this stuff can have for certain types of activities but on top of not having great hardware to run the dang things, I just don't find any of the proposed use-cases that compelling for me personally. It's just nice that the totalizing self-insistence of AI tech hasn't gobbled up every corner of the tech space, even if those crevices and niches are getting smaller by the day.

otikik 10mo ago

> AI browsers are proliferating Are they, though? I get bombarded by AI ads very frequently and I have yet to see anything from those "AI browsers" mentioned on the article.

viraptor 10mo ago
https://www.perplexity.ai/comet https://www.perplexity.ai/comet https://chatgpt.com/atlas/ https://chatgpt.com/atlas/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode https://www.genspark.ai/browser https://www.genspark.ai/browser https://www.operaneon.com/ https://www.operaneon.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://www.diabrowser.com/ https://fellou.ai/ https://fellou.ai/ And many many more...
- Maxion 10mo ago
  Do they have any users, though?
  - viraptor 10mo ago
    Would you like to research this and tell us?
    - otikik 10mo ago
      I don't, but that was also my point: I don't care if new AI browsers pop up, if no one uses them they might not even exist. I didn't even know that AI browsers were even a thing until I read this article. And I work on AI.
  - tim333 10mo ago
    I downloaded the chatgpt one, tried it for a minute, thought meh, and went back to my usual browser. Does that count as a user?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

countWSS 10mo ago

The problem with this is integration: no one would complain if it was an official plugin/extension, but integrating this plugin into Firefox is forced and unexpected decision. Firefox telemetry,labs/experiments and server-dependent features will lose it marketshare slowly in favor of local-only browsers that don't have online dependencies or forced bloatware. Like many i've switched long ago to LibreWolf.

dumbfounder 10mo ago

“Even if you can disable individual AI features, the cognitive load of monitoring an opaque system that’s supposedly working on your behalf would be overwhelming.” 99.9% of people haven’t ever had one single thought about how their software works. I don’t think they will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. Quite the opposite.

insin 10mo ago

If people could get into the habit of using "AI*" when they explicitly mean "LLM" but they have to say "AI" because hype, that would be nice.

tim333 10mo ago
It gets complicated. The * leads to "* The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither." And Bergamot is also a transformer based language model.

kogasa240p 10mo ago

Good stuff. Bit unrelated but I am excited for the imminent wave of lightweight Servo based browsers, will finally let people break free from the Blink/Gecko duopoly.

Fairburn 10mo ago

Lets be real. As someone pointed out, browsers are black boxes, regardless of who made/forked a browser family. Unless you make it yourself, we will forever be a dog chasing its tail. I would love to believe in the best of whichever I choose. And use it according to my comfort level.