- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.ml
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The new CEO of Mozilla, Laura Chambers, has a background working at all sorts of evil companies like AirBnB and PayPal. Its absolutely no surprise that the company immediately dropped plans to diversify in ethical, unique and privacy friendly ways as soon as she joined.
CEOs getting paid primarily in stock means grifters like this will drop their USP for whatever trend makes the line go up, if it is crypto, NFTs, or AI.
Shes not the new ceo, shes a temporary interim ceo while they find someone better
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.
Is that the same Mozilla that started the Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness?
What in living hell do proprietary and predatory AI services even doing here?
Mozilla just offered users to feed into the very abomination they claim to fight.
Also, for all things “AI”, local is the only way to go if you ever want to have a chance at privacy.
“Our initial offering”
They said in the article theyll also offer the use of self-hosted models later
They didn’t mention it anywhere
Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs.
Ok it doesnt say it directly but you can see where i got it from
Yeah, I got that, but I don’t think they mean that, exactly, otherwise it would be their focus indeed.
But I guess we’ll have to wait and see
As long as I can disable it, sure. Knock yourself out.
Not going to lie, AI can be a very powerfull tool but the “we want your browsing experience to be divine, but don’t worry we have your back” scares me shitless. Firefox has always had our backs, why do they feel the need to mention it now? Maybe I’m being paranoid but I feel like a browser shoulf just be a browser.
Firefox has always had our backs
It’s been going in a less friendly direction for a while. Embedding of mandatory useless extensions, aggressive advertising, deals to display more and more content to more users, disregard for user settings on multiple updates, opt-out telemetry, and now telling you that you’re using it wrong.
Sure, you can navigate through various settings to disable most of these, and check back on updates for settings that toggles back, or are simply renamed and mysteriously got back to their default, intrusive value. But we should not have to do that.
And that’s not even touching the issue with the Mozilla Corporation itself.
Firefox is the alternative browser, but it certainly isn’t there to “have your back”.
people please actually read the article not the headline; this is literally about accessibility improvements for blind and visually impaired people for generating alt text inside of documents and pdfs.
That’s one of the things, but it’s also adding a dedicated sidebar for AI. That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension, there’s absolutely no reason at all why that needs to be something built into the browser.
Developers should be providing alt text themselves, but in cases where they aren’t having a local image recognition model running to provide a description isn’t terrible as long as it’s either 100% local or completely opt-in.
The dedicated sidebar on the other hand feels very much like a cheap attempt to cash in on the AI fad.
That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension
It most likely is on the technical level, just shipped by default and integrated into standard settings instead of the add-on ones. And it’s going to be opt-in, so you won’t have to go into
about:configto disable it. Speaking of: You’re looking forextensions.pocket.enabled, it should befalse. And before you say “muh diskspace” it’s probably like 5k of js and css or such.
access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral
yeah but AI bad no matter if it would be actually useful for once
Now we just need accessibility tools for the cognitively impaired that can’t seem to read the damn article.
Many of the people complaining about a feature they would just disable and never use are also the same kinds of people who would complain about basic accessibility features and call them “unnecessary bloat”.
Fuck braille bro
Yeah, why do you think you can put bumps on my nice, flat screen. Entitles pieces of crap… :)
I don’t care. I don’t want AI in my browser.
Nice for you, fuck blind people.
Blind people shouldn’t need to give up their privacy to Microsoft and Google to have a web page read to them.
Let me just quote the top of this thread.
people please actually read the article not the headline; this is literally about accessibility improvements for blind and visually impaired people for generating alt text inside of documents and pdfs.
It doesn’t just read the page to them, which is a solved problem, it generates descriptions when they’re missing, making the web more accessible.
Great take.
Ai ScArY!¡! And you haven’t ever used google translate?
Some people care about privacy.
no. why the hell would I use google spyware crap?
trustworthy AI
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral
What
I would relatively ok with an implementation of Le Chat Mistral
Defund Mozilla lmao. Absolute shipwreck of a company at this point.
At least this is opt-in, and Firefox still allows for manifest v3 extensions, and, on the whole, isn’t using a engine funded by a billion dollar company that’s doing everything in it’s power to spy on you.
You mean v2?
Ah, yes, I do.
Yeah i was kinda overreacting but it really isnt looking good for firefoxes future at this point imo. As long as its open source there will at least be forks like librewolf.
Their whole company is funded by a billion dollar company that’s doing everything in its power to spy on you.
So what’s the alternative that is better
into it
Did you read the article? Why would adding an option to use ai in a side bar require shuttering a company?
“this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment”
And
“those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar”
If you are so keen to know, then you will just have to wait a few more years. Firefoxes development is rapidly derailing into nonsense recently. They will have to either kick out their current leadership or they will be reduced to a data sucking, adware company sooner or later.
Oh yes, as opposed to Google or Microsoft who definitely aren’t already data-sucking, predatory adware companies. No thanks, I’ll stick with the lesser evil.
If you’re going to lie to everyone at least make it sound believable.
Do you read any tech news? If so how did u miss every single mozilla headline of the past months? Something being the lesser evil doesnt turn truths into lies.
You’ve read the articles? Cool, can you give me a rundown of all the terrible things Mozilla has done in the past months?
So you admit you’re only reading headlines and base your opinion on it?
Did the thought cross your mind that all the billion dollar companies behind for-profit browsers might have an interest in Firefox failing?
Who do we turn to for a browser? Not chromium based I don’t trust google codebase.
Orion for macOS is pretty awesome.
I actually love Safari but on my work computer I’m forced to use their VPN and can’t run my ad blocking DNS stuff on it, so I use Orion with uBlock Origin on it. It’s basically Safari (built on WebKit) with support for Chrome and Firefox plug-ins (which can be selectively disabled).
Idk I still hope a Servo-based browser somehow materializes itself someday, but if/when that happens, who knows.
Yeah idk either sadly. But i know that having only two relevant browsers on the market is like the US party system. Destined to fail.
Nothing lasts forever just like Steam or anything else will one day turn to shit. But pretending like everything is fine will just lead to lots of “we shouldve seen it coming”.
I think it comes down to what you’re willing to sacrifice. If I can do banking that’s the hard line for me, so JS at the very least.
Honestly, the worst part of the AI craze is that so many people hear AI now and immediately hate it even though it can really do some amazing stuff, e.g. in medicine. AI as a blanket term just has so much variance, there’s a ton of trash and a ton of great stuff.
“AI” today mostly refers to LLMs, and whichever LLM you’re using, you’ll likely face the same issues (wrong answers creeping in, tending towards mediocrity in its answers, etc.) - those seem to be things you have to live with if you want to use LLMs. if you know you can’t deal with it, another rebrand won’t help anything
Part of the problem is that all ads anymore want push their version of “AI” in your face and some of these “AI” are nothing new just rebranded.
Part of my research as an undergrad was working with PLSA. It’s very much an algorithm.
Why does my open source browser need proprietary SaaS products stuffed into it?
Isn’t this what extensions are for?
Firefox has a tendency to embed optional extensions as impossible to uninstall core features these days, so it would not change much.
It also has google stuffed into it, and apparently the new consensus is that you need AI just as much for browsing as a search engine
Who else is gonna parse through the AI search results? Not me.
“Trustworthy AI” + Recent aquisiton of an advertising analytics company + a call for people to inform on third party sources of Firefox = Down the enshitification rabbit hole we go.
Any recommendations of a good alternative on android? I’m thinking I’ll move to librewolf on desktop but they don’t appear to have an android version.
I use a fork from F-Droid called Fennec. I’m not sure off the top of my head how closely it tracks with upstream feature-wise but I know it strips out all of Mozilla’s tracking components and it’s always updated within a couple days of the upstream release.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out!
I do like Mull, but I’m also uninformed and I don’t use my mobile browser all too much.
Fair enough, research time for me! Thanks for the reply
I use Fennec F-Droid on Android and LibreWolf on Linux/Mac/Windows.
Thanks for the recommendation :D
Everybody in the know is already using privacy forks on PC and phones… i guess it is time to get normies on boarded.
Man, they really are making it complicated though. If you want to fight them, jgot to keep switching. They know normies won’t :/
The way I see AI being implemented into Firefox, regardless of whether it’s gonna be opt-in or out in the future is that they need to keep up with the latest browser trends in the future. If they don’t, they will definitely lose more of whatever probably small amount of remaining normies who don’t use edge or chrome but instead opt for Firefox. They’re not tech literate enough to see a conveniently placed ad telling them that xyz browser now uses AI security features and Firefox doesn’t and discern the fact that it’s a ploy to get them to switch. We need more normies if we really want a chance to keep Firefox more than just treadingn water, and the best way is to offer more random bullshit of the week to keep them from switching to a competitor.
I wish they spent their time fixing bugs, rather than implementing this bullshit
Can I ask areal question? I’m not trying to be a dick or smart ass, I legit don’t get this. What is bullshit here? I read the article and it seems like a useful feature to me.
“this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment”
“those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar”
Is this opt in only feature really terrible? Because as a user of ai, not switching tabs sounds like a nice new feature to me.
I strongly believe that generative AI is catastrophically misused in the vast majority of its applications, so in my eyes, adding gpt-based AI to the browser is largely a wasted effort
I highly doubt they have one team that switches between experiments and bug fixes, never doing two things at once. Not to mention that something ultimately being ripped out isn’t necessarily wasted effort. They could likely easily pivot virtually anything they put into this specific experiment into any number of other uses.
Why not both? A large project like this needs to fix bugs and also continue to refine its features for long term relevance.
You will never achieve long-term relevance, by chasing immediately available buzzwords
How long does AI need to be used, and how much demand needs to be sustained, for it to stop being called a “buzzword”? I’m a little dubious that NVIDIA became literally the most highly-valued company on Earth off the back of a mere “buzzword.”
It doesn’t seem like end users are the ones demanding AI.
I’m an end user and I demand text to speech AI
I am an end user and I find it quite handy for a number of applications.
The reasoning “I don’t find it useful and therefore nobody finds it useful” is common in these sorts of threads.
If the sentiment is that common, maybe there’s something to it.
You made an assertion about what end users want. I’m an end user and my desires are not the same as your desires.
But if the sentiment is that common, maybe there’s something to it.
Or maybe it’s just a common fallacy. Like argumentum ad populum.
Can you reminds us what the current state of NFTs is? Or most crypto? Web3 tech? This is next.
Of course Nvidia are the highest-valued company. They capitalized on idiots misusing the technology, until it created issues in society, for personal gain.
Why are you explicitly picking those examples, and not things like IoT, DevOps and Edge computing, all buzzwords, all successful and still in general existence today?
You’re cherry picking failed buzzwords and using them as proof that “AI” will fail.
To be clear, I agree that LLMs are bullshit for 95% of applications they are being put into. But at least argue in good faith.
I chose those examples, because that’s what’s been heavily marketed recently, and it all either fundamentally failed, ended up being a scam, or both.
In contrast:
- devops is software automation practices…?
- edge computing is on-call load balancing? It’s horrendously expensive though, so i’ll give them time to figure it out
- IoT, admittedly, is largely oversold, but even then, there were a ton of products on the market that absolutely outlived all 3 of the examples i’ve given, combined. HomeAssistant+Zigbee home automation is awesome. A raspberryPi is “iot”. Your smartwatch is “iot”.
There’s a difference between cherry-picking, and refusing to accept that something is a scam. Crypto ended up begging for government regulation, when the original intention was to move away from it. NFTs are a pump-and-dump ponzi scheme. web3 literally doesn’t mean anything
LLMs aren’t a scam, I don’t even understand how you could twist it into such. While something like NFTs have no real legitimate use case, LLMs excel at translation and as an advanced form of spelling and grammar checking.
Your complaint seems to boil down to “it doesn’t work in all use cases it’s being used” which is fair enough, but if I put a car on my bed and try to use it as a blanket… does that make it a scam?
How do any of those things have anything to do with LLMs? You’re just listing a bunch of random tech that isn’t particularly impactful and claiming that another unrelated thing must be a failure.
Can you remind me how those technologies are related, other than the mere accusation of them being “buzzwords”?
Cryptocurrency is actually doing fine, BTW. Just because you don’t find it useful doesn’t mean it’s not useful to other people.
Crypto is doing kind-of ok. But what about other blockchain apps and startups, or blockchain integrations into every tech imaginable? There were so many popping up, just like there are with AI now. Business models and use-cases that are based solely on the hype of the tech in question, without any consideration about whether it’s actually a good fit for the tech. That is the point, and what it has common with AI and other “buzzwords”.
AI may have its uses, but the easy counterpoint to your argument is to look at FTX at its peak and where it is now (bankrupt). The stock exchange is the exact opposite of rational, and is terrible at estimating the use one can get out of tech.
FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange, how is that remotely similar to NVIDIA?
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Anyone have any other good suggestions for Firefox alternatives? Sounds like I may be needing to switch soon.
I highly recommend everyone making the switch to LibreWolf. It’s a custom version of Firefox that focuses on the things that matter like privacy and security, while cutting out the annoyances that Mozilla loves to add to their browsers.
Oh. This looks great. Thank you for sharing.
why would you need to switch, did you read the article?
Cause AI = bad
Duh 🤪
AI as in machine learning? No I dont think that’s bad. It’s a very useful technology that we’ve already been using for decades in a bunch of different fields. But I’m assuming you’re referring to LLMs which are what’s being integrated into Firefox.
I would argue that LLMs ARE bad. For multiple reasons. At least the big ones run by these giant tech companies.
If you’re locally running one with training data provided by you then I don’t see an issue with that really. (except maybe energy consumption issues. Though I don’t imagine a personal use LLM run locally would draw anywhere near the energy that something like Chat Gpt is drawing.)
I’m very much on the side that believes that what these LLM models do essentially boils down to theft/plagiarism though. So if you disagree with that you may disagree that LLMs are bad.
I did. I’m not needing to switch. At least not right now. (hence the ‘may’ in my original comment) But given the Laura Chambers interim CEO thing and now this LLM integration. Mozilla seems to be making moves that I don’t agree with. But as long as they stay true to their key tennents I won’t need to switch. Which would be good. Because I really don’t want to. But I’ve seen a enough good companies become bad companies that I’m weary for the future of the app. So being aware of what alternatives may be out there would be helpful.
Also Firefox but less shitty.
There are none.
Well shit.
Why Mozilla? Why? You were the chosen one… Fuck it, I’m going back to lynx! Tabs? Sure we have tabs in lynx, just run lynx in tmux
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what? Its opt-in
Sorry I can’t read your reply, lynx doesn’t render it properly ;)
Pretty sure the only thing I wouldn’t object to AI being used for in Firefox would be ad blocking. Surely they’re going to use this for that right?
…
Right?
…
Shit.
native tab grouping would be a much more desirable feature, to me
