6 ms·

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private

by peri-cl 10d ago

This 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 ago
I 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 ago
  It'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")
  - erikwiffin 10d ago
    Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/ https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/ They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.
    - mrguyorama 10d ago
      You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed) Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
      - aleph4 9d ago
        Google still blasts you to install Chrome at every opportunity if you use their services, and is heavily optimized for Chrome (e.g. Docs, YouTube). That's not really Firefox's fault.
padenot 10d ago
Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.
- HelloUsername 10d ago
  The "Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite" also points incorrectly (?) to https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Gemini-2-5-Flash-Lite-Model-Card.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
julenx 10d ago
The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first. > The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server. > > Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The LLM receives the request from Mozilla, not directly from you, and sees a Mozilla IP address rather than your own. The request includes only the information needed to generate a response or perform the requested action. Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification: > When you submit a query in the Smart Bar, the assistant uses a local (on-device) intent classification model to determine whether the query is best addressed by a chat or a search. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/
- Iolaum 10d ago
  Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.
  - walrus01 10d ago
    Mozilla has been in a bit of a recursive feedback loop death spiral for years now of: Browser loses market share -> try some weird thing -> very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share -> management says "oh shit we're losing market share we better try some weird thing" I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.
    - HappyPanacea 10d ago
      very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)
spwa4 10d ago
Except ... this is not local. It's a remote service. Here is something that is: docker run ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.3 docker run mcr.microsoft.com/playwright/mcp:latest Configure them. Open-webui needs a model (a local qwen3.8 does amazing), and you need to link them up. Playwright will just do stuff.
- input_sh 10d ago
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.
  - user2722 10d ago
    Oohohohohoohohohoho Merry Christmas!!!
  - darkwater 10d ago
    But Mozilla is bad and stupid! CEO pockets in a lot of money!!1!
busssard 10d ago
its up to us to make extensions that are so famous that they can be integrated into the browser functionality i guess
forgotaccount3 10d ago
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, How small is this 'small model' inference? Browsers especially are expected to operate on a very wide number of devices. It makes perfect sense to me to start off with a cloud driven approach and later allow people to configure it to run locally if they have the hardware to do so. Anyone with the hardware to do so is already signaling that they'd have the technical interest to make that change while having the default 'works for everyone' mode be one that doesn't require a powerful local device. I say this as someone using a 6 year old computer and only upgraded to 8GB of ram when the latest WoW expansion was released.
walrus01 10d ago
I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand. But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser. You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus). It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system. I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.
- jimmydoe 10d ago
  Agree, advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists(people who can afford large RAM and GPU) is absurd.
  - Barbing 10d ago
    >advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists ?: >marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain
    - well_ackshually 10d ago
      The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it. Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?
aucisson_masque 10d ago
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.
- walrus01 10d ago
  Indeed. Realistically a 'capable' small local LLM, even one that's definitely not as good as externally hosted ones will require a single 16GB GPU and access to basically all of the RAM on the GPU. That's not something people running Firefox on a $500 laptop with 8 or 16GB of total system RAM and a CPU-integrated basic graphics system have to spare.
  - nullc 10d ago
    No it doesn't. TODAY you can run with good performance a local LLM entirely on CPU that can do translation, summaries, search assistance, and all the things mentioned here. On a 8GB system with a SSD it might be a bit slow due to having to keep experts on disk, but perfectly usable. On fast systems it may well be faster than the network round trip for many tasks.
    - walrus01 10d ago
      > No it doesn't. TODAY you can run with good performance a local LLM entirely on CPU that can do translation, summaries, search assistance, and all the things mentioned here. What specific LLM and how much RAM does it take up to load? How does it run on somebody's 8GB RAM $600 laptop they bought from Best Buy? What pp/s and token/s rate on that hardware?
      - nullc 10d ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728887 How much ram has a fair amount of flexibility since MoE can be kept on flash and swapped in at a performance cost, and depending on how small a context you can use.
JeremyNT 10d ago
> This 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. I certainly agree that this option would be nice to have, but running firefox without an ad blocker on the modern web will ALREADY spin up my fans just rendering all the garbage, and I have a decent laptop. You can't expect the median Firefox-running device to be able to run a capable enough local model effectively.
- phrotoma 10d ago
  Just gonna go ahead and adopt the phrase "spin up my fans" to describe pissing me off.
lukewarm707 10d ago
zdr is good, really confidential inference with attestation would be better. the same as a confidential vm TEE which confirms the integrity and privacy. there are good providers available, i think it should become the standard. two high quality companies: near.ai tinfoil.sh
AstralSerenity 10d ago
This is ridiculous. Not only does Mozilla support BYOM with Smart Window, but do we seriously expect your average user to be able to locally run it with ease? Imagine for a moment the complaints that would arise the very next day because their browser is now revving up their laptop fans and hoarding precious RAM. Local models aren't yet light enough to handle the required processing at the lowest end, so Mozilla chose the most responsible stewards they could find. There is no news here.
yeoyeo42 10d ago
the average user has nowhere near enough the capability to run a model fast enough to do useful things
nhinck3 10d ago
Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?
- nosioptar 10d ago
  Same here. Nice to see the malware company has disabled ublock from working on their site. JFC, Mozilla is just comically evil at this point.
  - quadrifoliate 10d ago
    You are choosing a really bad example to make your point. Not letting extensions operate on the actual site where you install the extensions isn't being "comically evil" by any means.
    - nosioptar 10d ago
      Wheb the company is hellbent on shoving ads in their products and also blocks my adblocker from working on their site, I'd call that comically evil.
      - eipi10_hn 10d ago
        This has always been the case for years, for every browser. No idea why you say "now". Any browser providing extensions, not just Firefox, will at least won't allow extensions to modify their own extensions providing page. Otherwise, any malicious extension can infiltrate and trick users to download modified extensions from the browser's own extension page. Comically ignorant.
        masfuerte 10d ago
        support.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org are distinct sites.
  - deleted 10d ago
    [deleted]
deleted 10d ago
[deleted]
KronisLV 10d ago
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task. Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
- redox99 10d ago
  Not everyone uses laptops. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B (which is a REALLY capable model) in the background coding for me while I'm simultaneously browsing the web and playing VALORANT without any performance impact, and that's on a 6 year old GPU.
DANmode 10d ago
> for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. Mozilla does a great job of doing all sorts of things that help Google, these days…
glenstein 10d ago
I suppose some clarity would have been nice but I try to err on the side of charitable interpretation with these things, especially with how much MDS there tends to be in the hn comment sections. This does just seem to be like a high level announcement of the overall partnership, though some clarity over local versus cloud would have been nice. But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into a bit more detail: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=update https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=update
- peri-cl 10d ago
  Yes, that's one of the pages I wrote my comment about. I did try to interpret it charitably, but there's nothing on that page (everyone read it! It's short!) that simply communicates to users, "we're uploading your browsing history to the cloud". It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say > "They’re stored on your device, not on Mozilla’s servers," And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert? The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.
tyre 10d ago
> yet for inexplicable reasons Come on, man, I’m going to choose you’re just Posting saying shit like this. Because it’s useful. Because almost nobody has the hardware to run a local model with nearly reasonable performance (in intelligence + speed + RAM usage). Not everything is perfect. At least they’re building things.
- _ache_ 10d ago
  The strategies of Google and Apple, regarding how to provide a LLM, seam to disagree with you. Gemini run on a potato and Apple is local first. So, you may actually have very good performance with local model. Just not yet on *every* device. So the Mozilla strategy here feel very reasonable. A Cloud provider specialised in local models, to be able to switch once local models will be quick enough on most devices.
IndySun 10d ago
> "...the bare minimum of ethics..." That is a great phrase.

by peri-cl 10d ago

WhyNotHugo 10d ago

I 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 ago
It'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")
- erikwiffin 10d ago
  Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/ https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/ They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.
  - mrguyorama 10d ago
    You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed) Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
    - aleph4 9d ago
      Google still blasts you to install Chrome at every opportunity if you use their services, and is heavily optimized for Chrome (e.g. Docs, YouTube). That's not really Firefox's fault.

padenot 10d ago

Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.

HelloUsername 10d ago
The "Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite" also points incorrectly (?) to https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Gemini-2-5-Flash-Lite-Model-Card.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...

julenx 10d ago

The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first. > The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server. > > Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The LLM receives the request from Mozilla, not directly from you, and sees a Mozilla IP address rather than your own. The request includes only the information needed to generate a response or perform the requested action. Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification: > When you submit a query in the Smart Bar, the assistant uses a local (on-device) intent classification model to determine whether the query is best addressed by a chat or a search. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/

Iolaum 10d ago
Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.
- walrus01 10d ago
  Mozilla has been in a bit of a recursive feedback loop death spiral for years now of: Browser loses market share -> try some weird thing -> very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share -> management says "oh shit we're losing market share we better try some weird thing" I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.
  - HappyPanacea 10d ago
    very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)

spwa4 10d ago

Except ... this is not local. It's a remote service. Here is something that is: docker run ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.3 docker run mcr.microsoft.com/playwright/mcp:latest Configure them. Open-webui needs a model (a local qwen3.8 does amazing), and you need to link them up. Playwright will just do stuff.

input_sh 10d ago
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.
- user2722 10d ago
  Oohohohohoohohohoho Merry Christmas!!!
- darkwater 10d ago
  But Mozilla is bad and stupid! CEO pockets in a lot of money!!1!

busssard 10d ago

its up to us to make extensions that are so famous that they can be integrated into the browser functionality i guess

forgotaccount3 10d ago

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, How small is this 'small model' inference? Browsers especially are expected to operate on a very wide number of devices. It makes perfect sense to me to start off with a cloud driven approach and later allow people to configure it to run locally if they have the hardware to do so. Anyone with the hardware to do so is already signaling that they'd have the technical interest to make that change while having the default 'works for everyone' mode be one that doesn't require a powerful local device. I say this as someone using a 6 year old computer and only upgraded to 8GB of ram when the latest WoW expansion was released.

walrus01 10d ago

I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand. But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser. You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus). It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system. I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.

jimmydoe 10d ago
Agree, advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists(people who can afford large RAM and GPU) is absurd.
- Barbing 10d ago
  >advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists ?: >marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain
  - well_ackshually 10d ago
    The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it. Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?

aucisson_masque 10d ago

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.

walrus01 10d ago
Indeed. Realistically a 'capable' small local LLM, even one that's definitely not as good as externally hosted ones will require a single 16GB GPU and access to basically all of the RAM on the GPU. That's not something people running Firefox on a $500 laptop with 8 or 16GB of total system RAM and a CPU-integrated basic graphics system have to spare.
- nullc 10d ago
  No it doesn't. TODAY you can run with good performance a local LLM entirely on CPU that can do translation, summaries, search assistance, and all the things mentioned here. On a 8GB system with a SSD it might be a bit slow due to having to keep experts on disk, but perfectly usable. On fast systems it may well be faster than the network round trip for many tasks.
  - walrus01 10d ago
    > No it doesn't. TODAY you can run with good performance a local LLM entirely on CPU that can do translation, summaries, search assistance, and all the things mentioned here. What specific LLM and how much RAM does it take up to load? How does it run on somebody's 8GB RAM $600 laptop they bought from Best Buy? What pp/s and token/s rate on that hardware?
    - nullc 10d ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728887 How much ram has a fair amount of flexibility since MoE can be kept on flash and swapped in at a performance cost, and depending on how small a context you can use.

JeremyNT 10d ago

> This 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. I certainly agree that this option would be nice to have, but running firefox without an ad blocker on the modern web will ALREADY spin up my fans just rendering all the garbage, and I have a decent laptop. You can't expect the median Firefox-running device to be able to run a capable enough local model effectively.

phrotoma 10d ago
Just gonna go ahead and adopt the phrase "spin up my fans" to describe pissing me off.

lukewarm707 10d ago

zdr is good, really confidential inference with attestation would be better. the same as a confidential vm TEE which confirms the integrity and privacy. there are good providers available, i think it should become the standard. two high quality companies: near.ai tinfoil.sh

AstralSerenity 10d ago

This is ridiculous. Not only does Mozilla support BYOM with Smart Window, but do we seriously expect your average user to be able to locally run it with ease? Imagine for a moment the complaints that would arise the very next day because their browser is now revving up their laptop fans and hoarding precious RAM. Local models aren't yet light enough to handle the required processing at the lowest end, so Mozilla chose the most responsible stewards they could find. There is no news here.

yeoyeo42 10d ago

the average user has nowhere near enough the capability to run a model fast enough to do useful things

nhinck3 10d ago

Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?

nosioptar 10d ago
Same here. Nice to see the malware company has disabled ublock from working on their site. JFC, Mozilla is just comically evil at this point.
- quadrifoliate 10d ago
  You are choosing a really bad example to make your point. Not letting extensions operate on the actual site where you install the extensions isn't being "comically evil" by any means.
  - nosioptar 10d ago
    Wheb the company is hellbent on shoving ads in their products and also blocks my adblocker from working on their site, I'd call that comically evil.
    - eipi10_hn 10d ago
      This has always been the case for years, for every browser. No idea why you say "now". Any browser providing extensions, not just Firefox, will at least won't allow extensions to modify their own extensions providing page. Otherwise, any malicious extension can infiltrate and trick users to download modified extensions from the browser's own extension page. Comically ignorant.
      - masfuerte 10d ago
        support.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org are distinct sites.
- deleted 10d ago
  [deleted]

deleted 10d ago

[deleted]

KronisLV 10d ago

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task. Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.

redox99 10d ago
Not everyone uses laptops. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B (which is a REALLY capable model) in the background coding for me while I'm simultaneously browsing the web and playing VALORANT without any performance impact, and that's on a 6 year old GPU.

DANmode 10d ago

> for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. Mozilla does a great job of doing all sorts of things that help Google, these days…

glenstein 10d ago

I suppose some clarity would have been nice but I try to err on the side of charitable interpretation with these things, especially with how much MDS there tends to be in the hn comment sections. This does just seem to be like a high level announcement of the overall partnership, though some clarity over local versus cloud would have been nice. But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into a bit more detail: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=update https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=update

peri-cl 10d ago
Yes, that's one of the pages I wrote my comment about. I did try to interpret it charitably, but there's nothing on that page (everyone read it! It's short!) that simply communicates to users, "we're uploading your browsing history to the cloud". It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say > "They’re stored on your device, not on Mozilla’s servers," And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert? The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.

tyre 10d ago

> yet for inexplicable reasons Come on, man, I’m going to choose you’re just Posting saying shit like this. Because it’s useful. Because almost nobody has the hardware to run a local model with nearly reasonable performance (in intelligence + speed + RAM usage). Not everything is perfect. At least they’re building things.

_ache_ 10d ago
The strategies of Google and Apple, regarding how to provide a LLM, seam to disagree with you. Gemini run on a potato and Apple is local first. So, you may actually have very good performance with local model. Just not yet on *every* device. So the Mozilla strategy here feel very reasonable. A Cloud provider specialised in local models, to be able to switch once local models will be quick enough on most devices.

IndySun 10d ago

> "...the bare minimum of ethics..." That is a great phrase.