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

▲ julenx an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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/

▲ WhyNotHugo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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 ("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... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")

▲ busssard 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ padenot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	HelloUsername 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The "Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite" also points incorrectly (?) to https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...

▲ spwa4 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.