Mozilla Adding New 'ai Window' Feature to Its Firefox

Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

zekrioca

8 points

8 comments

connect.mozilla.orgTechstory

skepticalnegative

Debate

60/100

FirefoxArtificial IntelligenceBrowser Features

Key topics

Firefox

Artificial Intelligence

Browser Features

Mozilla is adding a new 'AI Window' feature to Firefox, sparking concerns and skepticism among users about its purpose and potential misuse of user data.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

29m

Peak period

3-4h

Avg / period

1.6

Key moments

01Story posted
Nov 14, 2025 at 2:05 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Nov 14, 2025 at 2:34 AM EST
29m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
3 comments in 3-4h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Nov 14, 2025 at 6:27 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (8 comments)

Showing 8 comments

codedokode

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I don't understand what they want to do, but I hope it won't be stupid, useless AI chat that sends all user data to OpenAI without disclosing it to the user. Nobody needs to talk to a computer program, and "AI chats" are the worst usage of otherwise important technology.

A good use of AI would be, for example:

- high-quality translation of a foreign text when you point a camera at it. Could be useful for travelers

- recognizing and reading aloud the text from camera image for people who have bad eyesight

- recognizing speech for people who have hearing loss

- image search, for example determining types of plants and insects and dog breeds

- checking grammar and style in text input boxes

reaslonik

about 2 months ago

1 reply

At least with their previous features it's been possible to set the address to any custom services you may have running, remote or local. For example Against all expectations I had I've actually found the highlight -> explain tool to be useful when sent to my local vLLM instance with a template I like.

Why not google/ddg/bing etc. them? That's on the context menu too, but LLMs seem uniquely suited at some problems like acronyms that are shared across many fields but different meanings, highlighting a sentence turns out the right acronyms very fast where search engines would take several attempts and is what I used to do previously.

codedokode

about 2 months ago

1 reply

LLMs can make things up though.

reaslonik

about 2 months ago

Of course, it's generally useful for things you can verify, which for acronyms is easy as long as you find the words

mdlxxv

about 2 months ago

1 reply

So, basically:

Firefox users: "Stop cramming AI into my browser!"