6 ms·

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? A

by mort96 8mo ago

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?

johnnyanmac 8mo ago
Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.
input_sh 8mo ago
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier? Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab. Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
- mort96 8mo ago
  Option 3: don't
  - input_sh 8mo ago
    Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment. It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
    - mort96 8mo ago
      Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?
      - input_sh 8mo ago
        "You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it. Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
        mort96 8mo ago
        The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that. I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone". More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
        input_sh 8mo ago
        > The AI boosting from the likes of you Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else. There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me). I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".
jeppester 8mo ago
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
- mort96 8mo ago
  Then you can install an AI extension.
  - jeppester 8mo ago
    You were saying: > I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar I answered: > If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful. > Then you can install an AI extension. As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension. It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
- UI_at_80x24 8mo ago
  Could you please describe your use-case? How do you use it? How do you make use of it? I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there? Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea. Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
  - jeppester 8mo ago
    I always have my browser open, so having it just one click away and not interrupting with whatever else the browser is showing feels convenient. I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.
throwawayk7h 8mo ago
I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.
- dormento 8mo ago
  As much as i detest everything about it, i must admit i'm mildly curious as to what workflows people are using it for.
lynndotpy 8mo ago
"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart". If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it. As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
AndrewDucker 8mo ago
They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI: https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/ https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/
wongarsu 8mo ago
The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2]. This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches. And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches 1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
- squeefers 8mo ago
  > This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
  - Volundr 8mo ago
    Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe... Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
    - squeefers 8mo ago
      i agree, but the guy said AI was a synonym for machine translation long before the currently confused meaning appeared
nsvd2 8mo ago
The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.
Dwedit 8mo ago
I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did. It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
stonogo 8mo ago
Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.
AdmiralAsshat 8mo ago
It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.
- sigmar 8mo ago
  LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.

by mort96 8mo ago

johnnyanmac 8mo ago

Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.

input_sh 8mo ago

IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier? Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab. Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.

mort96 8mo ago
Option 3: don't
- input_sh 8mo ago
  Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment. It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
  - mort96 8mo ago
    Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?
    - input_sh 8mo ago
      "You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it. Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
      - mort96 8mo ago
        The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that. I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone". More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
        input_sh 8mo ago
        > The AI boosting from the likes of you Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else. There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me). I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".

jeppester 8mo ago

> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.

mort96 8mo ago
Then you can install an AI extension.
- jeppester 8mo ago
  You were saying: > I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar I answered: > If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful. > Then you can install an AI extension. As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension. It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
UI_at_80x24 8mo ago
Could you please describe your use-case? How do you use it? How do you make use of it? I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there? Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea. Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
- jeppester 8mo ago
  I always have my browser open, so having it just one click away and not interrupting with whatever else the browser is showing feels convenient. I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.

throwawayk7h 8mo ago

I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.

dormento 8mo ago
As much as i detest everything about it, i must admit i'm mildly curious as to what workflows people are using it for.

lynndotpy 8mo ago

"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart". If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it. As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.

AndrewDucker 8mo ago

They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI: https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/ https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/

wongarsu 8mo ago

The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2]. This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches. And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches 1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...

squeefers 8mo ago
> This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
- Volundr 8mo ago
  Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe... Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
  - squeefers 8mo ago
    i agree, but the guy said AI was a synonym for machine translation long before the currently confused meaning appeared

nsvd2 8mo ago

The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.

Dwedit 8mo ago

I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did. It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

stonogo 8mo ago

Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.

AdmiralAsshat 8mo ago

It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.

sigmar 8mo ago
LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.