5 ms·
Thing is, there's a large (or at least certainly vocal) contingent of users (and mostly techies, to boot) that view "AI" as the Devil, and transformer models a
by TeMPOraL 8mo ago
Thing is, there's a large (or at least certainly vocal) contingent
of users (and mostly techies, to boot) that view "AI" as the Devil, and transformer models as the original sin, and they want to refuse to partake, wholesale.
This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview.
EDIT: See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 liking AI features to defecating on your food. It's not a technical objection, it's a principled one.
- ryandrake 8mo agoI figure, hey, at least Mozilla listened and provided the opt-out. It could be worse. I also happen to be in the "food defecating analogy" camp, and I can give the developer an unenthusiastic thumbs up for at least listening to the peanut gallery this time. Ideally they wouldn't make the product bad, with a badness opt-out, in the first place, but everyone in Silicon Valley's got to feed the AI monkey. So I guess this is the best we can expect.
- TeMPOraL 8mo agoFWIW, I may be in the other camp but I strongly respect them for providing this feature. It perhaps wouldn't be necessary if the pro-AI push wasn't so ham-fisted and utterly disrespectful of users for the past years. (Also I didn't realize how bad this push got until I visited California recently, and saw every other billboard - that's physical ad over a road - pushing some unqualified form of AI magic on me).
- crote 8mo agoAnd that's in turn because product managers keep calling everything "AI" and shoving the bad kind in every feature they possibly can.
- godelski 8mo agoWhat is the bad kind that Firefox is shoving in? Do they have any good kind? What's the ratio?
- mort96 8mo agoWhy is there a chat bot sidebar??? And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning. It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", I just wanna use a regular web browser...
- gkbrk 8mo agoBecause people like chat bot sidebars. My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser. ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
- mort96 8mo agoShould Firefox build in a separate side bar for every popular website? Would you want a Facebook side bar and Facebook account integration? I wouldn't.
- godelski 8mo agoThey kinda already do. Google is built in, just search right in there url bar. You also got DDG, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, EBay? They make it easy to add YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if you could add Facebook. And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...
- mort96 8mo agoOkay, and? Is anyone complaining about being able to search your favorite search engine from within Firefox? Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"? If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?
- PunchyHamster 8mo agoMore like excuse to add more of the features. "See, we gave you kill switch"
- account42 8mo agoExactly, what Mozilla is doing is malicious compliance.
- dizhn 8mo agoI use AI for coding, I don't want it on my browser. Actually I don't want it on Firefox. Let Brave be the AI browser. They could have used AI themselves to actually make their pathetic new split tab view usable.