The metaverse is here to stay! Blockchain is the future!

Without integrating metaverse and blockchain features into Firefox, Mozilla is at a significant disadvantage compared to other browsers. Don't get left behind!

Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?

> or get left behind.

Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.

I don't think it's quite that simple. A great deal of work has nothing to do with computers, and even more human activity has nothing to do with economic advantage. The scope of your statement is a bit too broad in that regard but for computer based work I think you are a) more or less right but b) if you are right it's not clear how much economic benefit LLMs will actually provide on balance, long term.

Does it make the world a better place, and more prosperous? Does it just move economic activity around a bit in regards to who is doing what? We'll find out in ten years when the retrospective economic studies are done.

People wonder why there's a backlash when the pro-AI side sounds like the Borg.

I disagree and I think the moment is now. Gemini 2.5 and now 3.0 is incredible. People that don’t recognize that and use AI tools now are as silly as a craftsman that uses a hammer as a screwdriver when he has a screwdriver in his toolbox. A good craftsman uses the right tool for the job to save time and do a better job and knows the limitations of each tool.

I can spend hours learning photoshop and then trying out color schemes for my new intricately detailed historic house or removing a car from the driveway or I can use Nano Banana and be done in a prompt. There is dignity in learning all that minutiae but I don’t care, I’m not a Photoshop artist, I just want the result and to just move on with my life and get the house painted.

AI crap has already been crammed into everything for months now, and nobody like it nor wants it. There is no proof that AI will continue to improve and no certainty that it will become a disadvantage not to use them. In fact, we are seeing the improvements slow down and it looks like the model will plateau sooner rather then later.

> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.

Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.

The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.

I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.

> Why ... wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?

Funnily enough, this is exactly how I justify Googling stuff instead of asking Gemini. Different strokes I guess!

> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?

For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.

> > I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.

> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.

I had to use a ledger database at work for audit trails because they were hotness. I think we were one of the few that actually used AWS QLDB.

The experience I've had with people submitting AI generated code has been poor. Poor performing code, poor quality code using deprecated methods and overly complex functionality, and then poor understanding of why the various models chose to do it that way.

I've not actually seen a selling point for me, and "because Google is enshittifying its searches" is pretty weak.

So instead of being flexible enough to adapt to new requirements as users demand them, they are blindly implementing things before they are requested just in case?

I'm quite sure only "we" care about esoteric browser features.

"Does it have tabs? OK. Fine."

Firefox losing market share were probably more due to Google nagging desktop users than features.

What did Chrome have that Firefox didn't?

Firefox fell behind Chrome because of aggressive marketing from Google in a way that probably violates some antitrust laws if they were actually being enforced, combined with a couple of own-goals from Mozilla.

Basically Google exploits their market dominance in Search and Mail to get people to use Chrome (and probably their other services too). When you search in a non-Chrome browser, you'll be constantly informed by Google about how much better their search is with Chrome through pop-ups and in-page notifications (not browser notifs). If you click a link in the Gmail app on iOS, rather than opening the browser, you get a Chrome advertisement if they detect it isn't your default browser.

This goes hand-in-hand with Chrome being the default Android browser (don't underestimate the power of being the default) and Mozilla alienating their core audience of power users by forcibly inserting features that those power users despise.

Chrome never won on features, it won on marketing and abuse of a different monopoly.

It works pretty well for Apple

>If this is what stops Firefox from drowning

By having the most engaged users leave and splinter the community furtehr in hopes that Mozilla out competes the trillion dollar monopoly in a war of data centers? We really will do anything except message your policy makers, huh?

I migrated several times before and am browsing around now. Id even be so bold to say that Mozilla dying will not kill the Quantum web engine scene, so I have no allegiance to rooting for yet another billion dollar corporation that has continually proven that their customers are not their interest. But I don't think "no one cares about you, just leave" is the healthiest option for your stated goals.

>Can we make sure we're fighting the right battles?

This isn't an argument, this is my statement. I don't want my tools to be bloated.

If the entire idea of a web browser collapses overnight, I'll make due. But the last thing I'll be accused of is remaining silent and having this industry bewildered on how this apocalypse came upon them. They got feedback and ignored it, stopped competing on merits over trends, and lost sight of what people actually want. That's their choice, and they will reap what they sow.

We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.

I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.

Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.

On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.

>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Yes, I have an extension for that.

>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

I have an extension that double clicks and brings up a quick definition. If I need more, I will go to the dictionary.

>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

No, not really. Ctrl + F search for a dozen substrings, use table of contents if available, and I can narrow it down. This takes a few minutes.

And if I did, I'd find an extension. You see the pattern here? We solved this issue decades ago.

> Do you ever...

There probably is a big difference between 'do you ever' and 'how often do you'.

I very rarely visit websites that I want translated; so rarely that I can tolerate google translate, or copying and pasting a section of a page into a tab with gemini; so on its own, this feature wouldn't sell me a browser. Besides, as a sibling comment says, even the current non-AI-enhanced browsers offer, sometimes too intrusively, to translate a page in a non-matching language. At least Chrome does this to me.

Your second scenario happens much more frequently; but again, it is so frictionless to type the term or a phrase in a search box in another tab that I never find myself wishing for a dedicated panel in the browser that could do this for me.

Your third scenario, for me, is finding something in api docs. Like, what's that command again to git cherry-pick a range of commits? So far, just googling this stuff or asking copilot / gemini in a separate tab has always worked. I am not sure I would be upset at a browser that didn't have an inbuilt tool for doing this.

What I do want from a web browser is evergreenness, the quickest and fullest adoption of all the web specs, and great web developer tools.

> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.

> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

Yeah. And?

> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.

These are incredibly poor AI sells...

>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."

>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.

>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."

I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.

Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...

The evidence is the billions of people who copy text to and from ChatGPT to other web pages.

We need some regulation on them for sure. They should be paying for the content they train on and use in their search results.

They’re still very compelling as a user.

It is already optional in Firefox, this is just FUD

I’m fine with an extension personally. And I don’t use Firefox to begin with, so I don’t particularly care what they do.

I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.

Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.

Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.

NFT was a meme in "People are going to buy my jpeg"

But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.

Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.

>Why?

Do we have to re-tread 3 years of big tech overreach, scams, user hostility in nearly every common program , questionable utility that is backed by hype more than results, and way its hoisting up the US economy's otherwise stagnant/weakening GDP?

I don't really have much new to add here. I've hated this "launch in alpha" mentality for nearly a decade. Calling 2022 "alpha" is already a huge stretch.

>When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

Why is this valuable? I spent my entire childhood reading, and my college years being able to research and navigate technical documents. I don't value auto-summarizations. Proper writing should be able to do this in its opening paragraphs.

>Imagine the browser asks you at some point, whether you want to hear about new features. The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN", "Please show me a summary once a month", "Show timely, non-modal notifications at appropriate times"

Yes, this is my "good enough" compromise that most applications are failing to perform. Let's hope for the best.

>Imagine you choose the second option, and at some point, it offers you a feature described as follows: "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title". Would you enable it?

No, probably not. I don't trust the powers behind such tools to be able to identify what is "clickbait" for me. Grok shows that these are not impartial tools, and news is the last thing I want to outsource sentiment too without a lot of built trust.

meanwhile, trust has only corroded this decade.

> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM

sure, you can imagine Firefox integrating a locally-running LLM if you want.

but meanwhile, in the real world [0]:

> In the next three years, that means investing in AI that reflects the Mozilla Manifesto. It means diversifying revenue beyond search.

if they were going to implement your imagination of a local LLM, there's no reason they'd be talking about "revenue" from LLMs.

but with ChatGPT integrating ads, they absolutely can get revenue by directing users there, in the same way they get money for Google for putting Google's ads into Firefox users' eyeballs.

that's ultimately all this is. they're adding more ads to Firefox.

0: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...

>Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

but.. why? I can read the website myself. That's why I'm on the website.

> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.

Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.

> The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN"

I've already hit that option before reading the other ones.

> "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title"

Why would you bother fetching the clickbait at all? It's spam.

The main transformation I want out of a browser, the absolutely critical one, is the removal of advertising. I concede that AI might be decent at removing ads and all the overlay clutter that makes news sites unreadable; does anyone have the demo of "AI readability mode"? Crucially I do not want it changing any non-ad text found on the page.

That last one sounds like a lot of churn and resources for little results? You're not really making them sound compelling compared to just blocking click bait sites with a normal extension somehow. And it could also be an extension users install and configure - why a pop up offering it to me, and why built into the browser that directly?

I like Firefox and don't think it's about to collapse like many users here, but I have already unchecked "Recommend features as you browse" and "Recommend extensions as you browse" along with setting the welcome page for updates to about:blank.

Ideally the user interface for any tool I use should never change unless I actively prompt it to change, and the only notifications I should get would be from my friends and family contacting me or calendars/alarms that I set myself.

> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...

Lots of imagining here.

For any mildly useful AI feature, there are hundreds of entirely dangerous ones. Either way I don't want the browser to have any AI features integrated, just like I don't want the OS to have them.

Especially since we know very well that they won't be locally running LLMs, everyone's plan is to siphon your data to their "cloud hybrid AI" to feed into the surveillance models (for ad personalization, and for selling to scammers, law enforcement and anyone else).

I'd prefer to have entirely separate and completely controlled and fire-walled solutions for any useful LLM scenarios.

> Imagine you have an AI button.

That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.

Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.

I have already clicked the all-caps button

I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for this. All the service would need to do to get my money is guess which words that already exist on the page I will be interested in and show me those words in black-and-white type (in a face and a size chosen by me, not the owner of the web site) free of any CSS, styling or "innovative" manner of presentation.

Specifically, the AI does not generate text for me to read. All it does is decide which parts of the text that already exists on the page to show me. (It is allowed to interact with the web page to get past any modal windows or gates.)