Firefox Is Becoming an AI Browser and the Internet Is Not at All Happy About It

Brave

Helium

LibreWolf

And no, I obviously don't want to fund Mozilla, a hilariously incompetent entity that hates its users.

I would also guess that there will be alternative packages for Firefox if there is enough people interested. Tor browser is a example of Firefox being packaged using different defaults and plugins. In theory one could take Tor browser, remove Tor, and have a hardernized version of Firefox with saner defaults.

Well, it was an excuse to get the pitchforks out! We love to do that around here. Especially if I can say "AI", "slop", "crypto", "MBA", etc.

Same here, but lately it seems like Mozilla will stop at nothing to get me to stop using Firefox. At what point should I say enough is too much?

  > It felt like everyone overreacted

I seriously don't get it and I understand why there's conspiracies about disinformation campaigns. But on all places I don't understand how HN users are just happily giving the keys to the internet to a singular company, let along Google.

  > Firefox still checks off the most boxes of what I want in a browser.

Why are browsers even "sticky"? There's no social network. Bookmarks are trivial to migrate. It's like the easiest thing to switch out there...

  > If I can turn it off as they claim 

You can already do so with the current AI stuff and it is an open source browser so they couldn't stop you if they wanted to.

It is the very information you feed to the AI to get results that is in danger. No matter how you mask some metadata or account info, the actual in-band content is a problem.

The only solution is self-hosting of a model so the input and output cannot be monitored. And this also means running it offline, since a "black box" model that can do RAG or MCP or anything like that could also use covert channels to leak the information you are trying to control.

They are simply too late to the party, and the best devs have long left.

I tend to agree with you. Doesn’t make what Mozilla is doing sensible.

In 1995, one could correctly observe that the internet would “play a role in nearly every interaction we have with a computer.” It would not follow that every app must reïnvent the network stack.

An AI helping out can be useful. Every app being a tiny AI is a cacophony of idiots.

I know it's a paradigm shift. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's often wedged into workflows in ways that aren't helpful to me or are actively harmful. And then there's the question of what is done with the data. I don't need another tech company, non-profit or not, getting a hold of my chatbot conversation history and doing God knows with it.

Mozilla should be a better facilitator of the ecosystem around AI than just putting it in Firefox. Take care of the concerns before just shouting "me too" on a bunch of LLM features, which, to be honest, shouldn't even be a concern for FLOSS.

If someone wants GenAI in Firefox, they can create a branch, design it, implement it, and put it up for discussion. I don't need some CEO telling me the direction of the project. It's the cathedral vs the bazaar, which has been a major part of the FLOSS ethos for decades now.

Yes, it might totally be the case that in 5 years this comment reads as correctly predicting the future that is to come. But it's also possible that it doesn't.

It's not at all clear to me which things will persist in time at the moment they are getting popular. There are lots of technologies that look promising in the beginning and up fizzling out.

Browsers are useful now, and they have been useful for a while. It seems to me like a safer bet to invest on them still doing what they are useful at, in the case that the web keeps being a thing for a while still :)

There is a great deal of doubt about that. I think that's a very unlikely prediction you're making.

For me though the closest I can get to the good old days is Kagi. Not a sponsor.

LLMs that are trained off of that dreck and give you the answer you were looking for sometimes, when they don't make it up.

And they've gotten to the point where they do so more quickly than trying to find it yourself in many cases, but I would much rather websites and search results being faithful stewards of the functions they are intended for and to get the information from the tap rather than having an AI butler deliver it to me.

Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.

Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.

And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.

I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.

AI can't solve that problem.