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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing
- pluc 10d agoWhat is "AI browsing"?
- Kuinox 10d agoAI are excellent at ingesting tons of data and getting something relevant from what you asked. I ask it about linux behavior and it will dig through hundreds of patches & mails and will return me informations sourced with links to the patches, mails containing it's affirmations.
- RicDan 10d agoThis sounds great, will have to try it out. Interested in the business value they gain from this, as this appears to be free. I guess for mistral it's great marketing material. Edit: Quite interested in the differences of local optimizations... that does allow for specific sensorship, but alas that's already possible in a more direct, reliable way.
- mugul 10d agoI think that beyond marketing this is also a way to collect "AI browsing" trajectories. Not an expert but I think this is the kind of great quality data that can be useful when training LLMs.
- sourcecodeplz 10d agoSeems like what Chrome has with the default built-in Gemini Nano model. Hey at least "some" news/things from Mistral. Seems like ages ago when they launched vibe-code. > Powers context-aware search, page summaries, and memory retrieval across browser tabs. > Live in France and North America, with launches in the UK and Germany planned for later this year. > Built on a zero data retention policy; conversations are not saved on Mozilla’s servers by default. > Models are fine-tuned on regional languages, dialects, and local nuances to provide native-feeling responses. > Extends Mistral’s open-weight AI models directly to consumer web browsing alongside its enterprise offerings.
- karussell 10d agoI don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?) I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.
- debugnik 10d agoThe outrage about Gemini Nano in Chrome was the surprise extra 4GB download plus their attempt to expose it as a non-standard browser API, IIRC.
- fn-mote 10d ago> Nowhere in the news they say it is offline Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”. How else could the information be kept private? I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.
- nickthegreek 9d agoNew apple watch markets their new listening feature as private, but they are not happening on device.
- Timshel 10d ago> conversations aren’t saved on Mozilla’s servers by default, and partners like Mistral agree to zero data retention. I don't read this as offline ...
- pessimizer 10d agoPeople only read the headline, and the headline lies.
- JeremyNT 10d ago> Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”. Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
- peri-cl 10d agoThis is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent. (Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b). [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models
- WhyNotHugo 10d agoI can't fathom how they'd consider "Private" something that uploads all the sensitive information in readable form to a third party service. In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.
- peri-cl 10d agoIt's more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google servers, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the browser, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ("Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud (addons.mozilla.org)") And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy: > "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private." https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on-project-bergamot/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")
- sajithdilshan 10d agoDidn’t OpenAI tried to build even a new AI browser and failed? I honestly don’t need AI in my browser and would not let an agent to access my login credentials/cookies/saved payment methods for various sites.
- ulimn 10d agoIt's pretty nice for tedious tasks. I tried to have it look through job listings based on my criteria. It burned through my 5h Claude quota, but what I got was pretty impressive. I agree on the privacy concerns but this could be useful with a local model, I think.
- sajithdilshan 10d agoFor me it’s not only privacy, I just don’t trust an agent to use my credentials without doing any destructive task because unlike an MCP, I cannot enforce any permission model on the browser
- aniceperson 10d agothis is chatgpt, web gui from mistral built-in Firefox, not for tech savvy users. I think anyone that will complain about this knows very well that you can just give your harness control over firefox through puppeteer, which is much more powerful. could firefox itself become a harness and speak openai api responses? maybe yeah, but why?
- HelloUsername 10d agoRelated, but hardly activity: "Firefox Smart Window" 21.apr.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852016 "Firefox Smart Window" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345179 "Firefox and Exa Partnership" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346066
- Madmallard 10d ago"Private" Guess we just using buzzwords for marketing and have no morality or principles anymore. Bad timeline and people you should just not trust.
- Good4boothee 10d agoAll previous similar issues got hand waved with "Mozilla has to make money somehow". I am afraid one day remaining users will decide that Chromium based browsers provide a better experience in most use cases, and now have same privacy guarantees as Firefox. Looking at market share maybe that had already happened and pragmatism won over ideology, and we will all suffer the consequences of such monoculture.
- nosioptar 10d agoThis announcement pushed me over that edge. I get asked about stuff like browsers all the time, part of the fun of being the token nerd in a small backward town. From here on out, my response is going to be that both Chrome and Firefox are malware. But, if you're going to use one, go for chrome so your shit at least kind of works. Mozilla, if you're reading this: Enough is enough. I've had it with these motherfucking clankers in your motherfucking browser!
- preg_match 10d agoThese comments are so annoying and they pop up on literally any news Mozilla releases. Like… ever. No, Firefox is not malware because it includes an OPTIONAL feature. Yes, chrome is 100x worse than Firefox when it comes to data privacy. Yes, Firefox works in 99.9999% of websites. Yes, the performance of Firefox is about the same as chrome. Nobody who seriously gives even a single fuck about privacy is going to be dropping Firefox because of this. Because that’s stupid. The only conclusion, then, is that people who are dropping Firefox because of this don’t care about privacy at all, and just want an excuse to use chrome. But I guess saying “well I like chrome” is too much, so we just lie instead. It’s fine to use chrome. It IS NOT fine to lie through your teeth and claim you use chrome because Firefox is just as bad for privacy. Because it’s not, and not a single person would drop Firefox for that reason. You just want to use chrome. So do that, and stop shitting on Firefox as if Mozilla implementing 0.01% of the malware chrome has is the end of the world.
- hollow-moe 10d agoGlad to use ~~Unmozilled Firefox~~ Librewolf
- herrherrmann 10d agoWaterfox also works well!
- duskdozer 10d agoI remember using Waterfox in the past, I think because they were keeping an old UI. Is that the draw over Librewolf?
- tmtvl 10d agoFor me the draw is that Waterfox has partnerships in order to provide funding so if/when Mozilla truly loses the thread (which some may argue they have) WF can keep going on its own, whereas the Librewolf devs have stated that if push comes to shove they can't maintain an entire browser themselves.
- bjord 10d agowaterfox is downstream of firefox and can't meaningfully match mozilla's maintenance of the core browser librewolf devs are just more honest about it
- Forgeties79 10d agoHas WF said as much?
- nosioptar 10d agoPalemoon doesn't embed clankers as far as I know. SeaMonkey exists. But, I'm sure Mozilla will fuck it up if they ever remember it exists.
- eis 10d agoMozilla lost the tech race and with it a lot of users. Firing a lot of their talented developers didn't help. Now Mozilla is giving up the only reason why they kept a core audience of privacy focused users by sending our browsing data to third party servers for inference just at the time when small local models are getting good enough for many/most use cases like summarization or translation. Chrome provides an API for local LLMs. Apple is trying to run as much interference locally as possible. Mozilla is worse than that. Claiming private browsing while sending data to third parties. I don't care what their data retention policies are, I don't want my data to be sent to others full stop. Private means it's mine, it's under my control. Handing it to third parties is not private.
- goobatrooba 9d agoI don't understand this negativity. It seems to be a fully optional separate service. No one is losing anything.
- shevy-java 10d agoPlease don't.
- sick_of_slop 10d ago[dead]
- mixcocam 10d agoWould be very cool if you could type a long query and the model would just build an advanced google search query using what you typed. You could even ship a tiny model in the browser itself that does that. Something like: "blog posts which talk about using sending emails to yourself as a notes taking mechanism". The output could look like: "note taking" OR "notes" ("emailing yourself" OR "email to myself" OR "email yourself") (inurl:blog OR inurl:posts OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com)
- amelius 10d agoIt wouldn't be cool because it would still hand your data to Google.
- _flux 10d agoI assume Google was just a placeholder for a search engine in the example. And you'll surely need some service to search the web.
- amelius 10d agoIt could anonymize the data, at least.
- duskdozer 10d agoI don't know about that. When I hear people reference "Google" it seems to me they do mean Google. Similar with "Claude".
- Forgeties79 10d agoPeople still use “Google” as a synonym for “online search.”
- duskdozer 10d agoYes, and IME it also is true that "online search" means in fact google.com. And there's no distinction for search results and reading the google AI summary.
- SophiaVela 10d agoI’m fine with cloud features, but I’d like to know what stays on my device and what gets sent out. “Private” is a bit vague.
- qmmmur 10d agoI cannot in a million years imagine using these features. Just be more organised.
- coffeefirst 10d agoI understand why they built this. They probably should and this is probably the right way to do it. And also yes, I’ve tried Dia and OpenAI’s thing and I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do with the feature. And then it dawns on me what I really want is a modernized bookmarks system…
- Goldenstone 9d ago[flagged]
- m00dy 10d ago>>Mistral has been releasing open weight, frontier models since our first release. yeah ?
- NOTanAlagent 10d ago[dead]
- poulpy123 10d agoNot sure if it's a locally run model or in the cloud. If it's the former they don't explain the size on disk and more importantly on memory. I know that google is using local models on the pixel phones, so it's doable. If it's the later, the "Mozilla don't keep the data" is hypocritical and I'm perplexed by the cost associated. In any case as a french, I prefer my personnal data be exploited by a french company :D Edit: after reading the comments, it is not a local AI so "Mozilla don't keeep the data and don't train on them" is really hypocritical if they cannot confirm that it's the same on mistral side. And there is still the question of the cost.
- mattstir 10d agoIt's interesting to see Firefox attempt to create slightly more privacy-focused cloud inference infra (assuming you can trust that they adhere to their own policies and don't have bugs, and that their partners adhere to their contractual obligations and don't have bugs). Unfortunately that's still a lot of trust that's pretty much impossible for the end-user to verify, but at least it's something? Arguably it's better than the alternative of directly trusting AI companies that have shown absolutely no regard for other laws like copyright, but the marketing of this as ultra-private still leaves a bad taste. I wish this announcement clarified the cloud aspects directly instead of needing to browse through two layers of links to find how it actually works on a privacy notice.
- surcap526 10d ago[dead]
- surcap526 10d ago[dead]
- stfu111 10d agoFuck off with this AI bullshit.
- estebarb 10d agoI really do not get the obsession with translation, particularly bad translations and translating by default. Most people who browse websites in languages other than the official local one are fluent in that other language. Google Chrome keeps insisting that Spanish is Galician. PowerPoint insists on changing the spell checker back to the wrong language and ignores setting the language for the whole presentation. On Linux, ChatGPT insists it must enable the spell checker in the local system language, so everything is always red. Privacy aside, a lot of software seems to be built assuming people cannot be multilingual.
- allan_s 10d agoBoth are true, a lot of people are multilingual but a lot are also not. I know a lot of foreigner for which the feature is really useful (local department store, booking a doctor appointment etc.)
- micromacrofoot 10d agoI don't know many people, but I do know someone that relies on machine translation to browse the English web. Remember "most" is not "all." The web should be accessible to every single person.
- syntaxing 10d agoIt’s not obvious but you can use this with your own local (or any) models. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom
- asdfsa32 10d agoThis should BE front and centre and what is sold, not ads for a 3rd party.
- rsolva 9d agoI tried adding my own endpoint, but the save button was still greyed out so it did not work. Maybe the feature is not fully implemented yet? In about:config, I could add the endpoint and api key, but not the model name.
- rsolva 9d agoFound the reason, HTTP-endpoints has to be localhost or 127.0.0.1, if you want to use other endpoints it needs to be HTTPS.
- rsolva 9d agoKeys that needs to be set in about:config - browser.smartwindow.apiKey - browser.smartwindow.customEndpoint - browser.smartwindow.model Adding my http endpoint (using LAN IP) seems to work, getting around the check in the regular settings.
- djray 10d agoThey misspelled their own company name: "...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world" A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here. I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.
- AstralSerenity 10d agoOn the bright side, at least we know it was typed by human hands!
- bluebarbet 9d agoPerhaps it was planted (satire)
- pferde 10d agoNeat, how can I turn it off?
- nullc 10d agoCloud inferrance is not private: These providers, even if they don't get hacked, have bribed employees, or outright lie, cannot and will not resist a subpoena or similar. Mozilla is acting unethically by obfuscating what's on offer here and overstating the privacy and security properties that can be achieved. It's doubly unfortunate because simple translations are completely reasonable to do with cpu inference.
- nullc 10d agoLate thought: consider what telegram went through over just end to end encryption... And practically every country has lower privacy standards for data that crosses borders.
- kh_hk 10d agoNo amount of pixel art will convince me to give up on the freedom to choose.
- dwedge 10d agoThese are two companies that seem to be slipping in ethics recently. I'd prefer this over a chrome and openai offering, but I no longer trust these two to necessarily do the right thing regarding privacy
- dtj1123 10d agoHold the AI, just give me a zen/Vivaldi like autohiding vertical tab stack and we're good.
- sehw 10d agoNobody asked. Give me back my RAM.
- glenstein 10d agoI remember the days when people justified Google Chrome's maximalist RAM usage by saying it was a good thing because it was allocating what the program actually needed to run quickly and efficiently, and it was better to grab what it actually needed then to operate inefficiently while using fewer system resources. For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.
- mokre 10d agoSo now mistral has partnership with browser + user logs from Mozilla. Does it means that they are trying to build their own search index? Because it’s kinda huge inference investment in exchange for what? Any other ideas why they need this?
- cranberryjoe 10d agoThis will put duo lingus out of business.
- einpoklum 10d ago"Mozilla" and "private" are two phrases that don't go well together, these days.
- athrowaway3z 10d agoWhat the fuck is the point of this? What is Mistral bringing to the table for Firefox? There is nothing "open" about this in any way. FF needs to either profile itself as the no-ai-by-default browser, or it needs to just have OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/DeepSeek bid for the default spot - like they do with Google search. I'm happy Mistral exists. I'm happy Firefox exists. None of this shows any synergy i'm excited about. Maybe FF believes there is a group of users who are still on the fence about using FF - until they can pitch them a first-class build-in AI story that goes with the anti-establishment vibe? I somehow doubt that's the pitch & potential userbase they should be focussing on.
- havaloc 10d agoFirefox/Mozilla really lost the plot. Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple? Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!
- Jzuckerman 10d ago[dead]
- nullc 9d agoAnother element of these "claimed to be private but can't keep its promises" is how caustic it is to the trust we have for our friends, family, and business associates. People here can be privacy aware and well informed and avoid these data slurps-- perhaps go dig up the hidden settings to completely disable it or add firewalls so an errant keypress won't upload your browsing history. That's good. But anything I share with another person or put on some webpage for another-- perhaps highly trusted person like a doctor or lawyer-- is exposed to them uploading it perhaps completely unwittingly (e.g. they fell for the exaggerated privacy claims) or due to an innocent misclick. Normalizing privacy fails like this undermines the ability of even the most informed and aware people to opt-out.
- itsmeduncan 9d ago[flagged]
- spncai 9d ago[dead]
- rye_pan 9d agoPretty keen on the private, multilingual aspect here. Could be a real game-changer for digging through non-English dev docs.
- zecg 9d agoI certainly hope one of Ironfox or Librewolf will strip this shit out by default.