- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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unfortunately other forks depend on mozilla survival for thier survival as forks.
Am engineer. Know zero professional people in the engineering community who use AI browsers, and very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats.
In my personal life I know zero people who use these browsers. I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.
Start making tools to give to people to combat this bullshit from the EU. Build a USABLE and decentralized chat app that people can actually use FFS. Build something like Proton and ACTUALLY BECOME SELF-SUFFICIENT.
Others have eaten your lunch because of this exact thing. Do better.
I feel stupid for asking but what is an AI agentic browser even supposed to do? Search things based on your query? Well search bars have been a thing since forever. 🤷
very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats
Not even translation? That’s probably the biggest browser AI feature.
Translation is my main use. Yes, the caveat that AI is 50/50 wrong is still there but at least I don’t have to pester friends that know the language for everything. I only use it for unimportant things.
I only use it for unimportant things.
The key to responsible AI use. Of course, in the grand scheme, few things are all that important.
If the marginal cost of being wrong about something is essentially zero, AI is a very helpful resource due to its speed and ubiquity.
To be fair, it’s way better than 50/50, but of course no guarantees still.
It gets the job done enough to understand the jist for me, yeah. But mostly I only do short posts. A language like Japanese makes it just a lot harder from what I understand from friends that learned the language. IIRC it’s because the language relies on unspoken context and of course its grammar making machine translation trip.
The main use for AI that I’ve seen in my circles is a search engine replacement. Not because AI is a good search engine, but because search engines have largely become useless.
If Mozilla wants to cement their place, create a better search engine. It’s how Google came to control a huge portion of the internet, and there’s now a huge vacuum waiting for someone to replace what we lost.
Exact same thing with anyone I know who uses it. You used to be able to type questions into search engines, now it picks one word from that question and gives you slop results.
Why, you didn’t want all of the top results to be scams?
AI search is useless for the same reason search engines are useless. But at least search engines force you to look at the source information and the context around it. So AI search is even more useless.
Making a better search engine solves nothing. There are several dozen of them already but Google remains on the top for a variety of reasons, including continued anticompetitive behavior and overwhelming consumer apathy. Most of the other ones aren’t sustainable without using the same shady advertising Google is using. Kagi being the exception. Mozilla could definitely offer a similar paid solution.
“Am engineer”. This is reddit level cringe stuff. There are tons of engineers, we’re not special and most of us are equally dumb. Its funny you mention proton when they’ve made pro-***** statements and then trying to stay neutral in the blowback. “AI” has its uses like you said, in docs and stats. Firefox will NEVER be self-sufficient because they exist on funding from Google to exist as their only competition to not be a browser monopoly. As much as we hate it, there is a complicated line to be towed here. Mozilla isn’t perfect, but they’re far from an enemy here. The Firefox forks we love so much won’t exist without this
Am engineer. I use AI features in browsers, and know several others who also do. I’m looking forward to trying additional features Mozilla’s going to be bringing in the future.
Basing your view of what everyone does on what everyone you know does is a perfect way to amplify the effects of a social bubble.
Mind explaining what features and why?
Earlier on, Mozilla released a plugin called Orbit that summarized Youtube videos with a single click. Then they shut it down. I’d love to see that back. I’ve found some similar plugins since then but none as elegant and integrated as Orbit was. “Chat with this page” features in general are nice when I come across a big paper or news story where I only want a specific bit of information out of it.
I use the “translate this” function quite frequently, and I’d like to see that using local models instead of relying on Google Translate. I avoid Chrome because I don’t want everything to be Google dominated.
I suspect AI is still too heavyweight for this application yet, but as the advertising wars continue and advertising starts getting slipped directly into the content of pages I bet an AI-enabled adblocker would be nice.
A fact-checker AI that goes through the content of a page and adds footnotes and references would be great. I try to fact-check news stories but it’s a lot of manual drudgery so I’m sure I miss a lot.
Sure, much of this could be done with plugins. Orbit was one originally. But if everybody’s having to create the AI framework for plugins from the ground up that’s going to result in a ton of inconsistency, extra resources wasted, and potential insecurities. I’d like Firefox to provide some kind of unified interface to plugins to let them call AIs as part of whatever they’re doing so that I can pick which models I’d like them to use. I run Ollama on my computer, it provides AI inference to anything that wants to use it locally through a unified API. Something like that built into Firefox would be awesome.
And there’ll likely be plenty of other new things I haven’t thought of to try out. AI is a very active field, there are new models with new capabilities coming out all the time.
You sure are relying on the accuracy of the misinformation machine.
And you sure are relying on just believing whatever you read without any checking whatsoever.
Source?
Source for what?
I’m curious, what AI features do you use and why? I can’t even figure out what one is supposed to do.
I just responded to a similar question by Ashtear@piefed.social above, listing a bunch of things I do with AI that having a framework embedded right into Firefox would make a lot more convenient, hopefully it provides some answers for this as well.
What about all those ladder climbers who want to sound like they’re tapped in to the pulse of cutting edge technology to the bosses? I work with engineers and it seems to be pretty split between full adoption and full rejection.
LLMs aren’t going to make you good at your job.
If you lacked coming in and relied on this bullshit, you’ll suck even more going out when they figure out you can’t have a conversation about the thing you were hired to be an expert on, buddy.
Good luck to you.
Im genuinely confused by your reply. I wasn’t referring to ladder climbers in a positive light. I see them shoehorning AI into pointless projects that dazzle the bosses because they don’t know any better or because they want to dazzle their own bosses with more jumbo jumbo derived from their own reports.
Small LLMs could be useful in-browser for automating actions - e.g. reject all cookie/tracking popups. Consent-o-matic only works for half the sites I encounter and doesn’t support mobile
Security however is another rabbit hole
You could tey Super Agent on firefox. Though they only have 40 free pop ups before paying either subscription or one time pay.
It worked really well for me and I didn’t realize it was doing its thing until I quickly reached the 40 pop up limit.
LLMs are useful for summarization. That is it.
How often are you needing a summary of the thing that you’re browsing at the moment?
Yeah, no. LLMs are known untrustworthy so need a validation step so they aren’t a great fit for any automation you don’t look at… unless you don’t really care about the outcome
What would work here is a browser API for cookie settings. You set your preferences with the browser and the sites check the browser. I don’t think this is likely to happen because people with influence and money in tech wouldn’t be able to point to how annoying the modals are and say “Look X government is doing something we don’t like so you should be angry and not trust them”
Consent-o-matic does too support Firefox mobile! What makes you think it doesn’t?
The mobile sites I visit don’t have the cookie banners auto dismissed
Curious. There are certain ones it doesn’t work on, both on desktop and mobile, but works as normal other than that. Maybe check your settings?
I understand the existential pressure Mozilla faces. Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers
Is there any data to back this up? Last I checked Firefox was still the 3rd most used browser, by a wide margin.
How wide of a margin could it possibly be when their market share is in the single digits?
Edit: I looked it up. Their market share is 2.3%.
Just be aware this doesn’t represent real users for various reasons.
Chrome is also often used for bots, and god knows that internet is more than half of that these days.oh yea it is, im in a forum where people use bots through proxies, and anti-detect browsers to spam on reddit, OF accounts do this too to peddle thier businesses, and most of them uses chrome since its" more trusted by reddits filters"
I took it to mean that newer AI browsers were taking mind-share, if not market-share. I think you’re right that they’re minuscule in terms of actual user numbers, perhaps because there are many of them now.
Would love more expert opinions about the different Firefox forks
If you’re maintaining any Firefox forks, it’s your moral duty to not cotribute your patches directly to the Firefox project, maybe even to turn it into a hard fork.
It’s…complicated.
On one end, a clear sign of “f*** you” with such decisions is important. On the other, Mozilla is already in a rough place, and with so many genuinely good projects, including Waterfox, depending on Firefox or at least Gecko, this is akin to biting the hand that feeds you.
All these teams cannot maintain their own browser engine, and without it, they may as well turn to dust. Thereby, maintaining their upstream is in their best interest.
Would love to see an iOS version. I do enjoy the FireFox functionality of seeing tabs on other devices easily.
Iirc aren’t all iOS browsers just reskinned safari?
The EU forced Apple to allow other rendering engines, but implementing one costs money vs just using WebKit for free, so nobody does it.
I don’t understand this part:
Waterfox’s governance has allowed it to do something no other fork has (and likely will not do) - trust from other large, imporant third parties which in turn has given Waterfox users access to protected streaming services via Widevine.
Widevine is the defacto standard proprietary technology for DRM-locked content. It’s used by all the major streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. Without it, publishers would not make their content available to those platforms for fear of rampant piracy, especially for high quality and 4K content. I guess Widevine requires some sort of vetted relationship with any browser that wants to use their tech.
High quality with their shitty bitrate? Lmao.
Their deal with Google for Widevine is separate from Mozilla, basically.
Been using it since near the beginning. Glad to hear!
