Mozilla is trying to innovate and bring new features to Firefox, but the browser continues to lose users. Despite these concerning market trends, the company is actively...
I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.
There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
Personally I use the chatbot side panel once in a while, it doesn’t get too much in the way while doing something else.
But all the other features using a small trained model are legit nice (translation, image captioning) and thankfully all optional.
I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.
There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.