Mozilla laying off ~60, adding AI to Firefox.

[Brinstead]

Summary

Mozilla will be 'scaling back' on it's VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber.  Shutting down Hub, and scale back investment in it's Mastodon instance.  Approx 60 folks getting canned.  They'll be adding AI to Firefox.

 

Quotes

Quote

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

 

My thoughts

Just what is 'trustworthy' AI?  Will this be a good thing or a bad thing for Firefox as a browser - focusing more resources on it or the beginning of enshittification?  I just moved back to Firefox from Chrome, but I'm hesitant to use anything 'AI' since none of the existing algorithmic intelligence engines that are in use were trained ethically to start with.  Is "AI" even a good thing to have in a browser?

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/?guccounter=1

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, Brinstead said:

They'll be adding AI to Firefox.

Ah yes. AI the new hotness. I will not be using that feature.

[da na]

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

[soldier_ph]

inb4 they wanna get on the Hype Train of adding some shitty "AI" assistant to your Browser. Welp, I hope I'll be able to disable that BS once it gets added. I guess I gotta look into Tor again and see how fast and good it is nowadays. Might as well just switch to Tor once Firefox becomes contaminated with "AI" BS as well.

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

hey mozilla,

I have a brilliant idea on how you could improve the android browser in 5 minutes: in darkmode make it black. The grey looks like background glow on OLED displays.

 

I hope AI will go down the same path as Pocket. Annoying but easy to disable.

[Lunar River]

46 minutes ago, da na said:

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

still to this day, i have never used an LLM to help me search the internet.

[williamcll]

3 hours ago, FlyingPotato_is_taken said:

hey mozilla,

I have a brilliant idea on how you could improve the android browser in 5 minutes: in darkmode make it black. The grey looks like background glow on OLED displays.

 

I hope AI will go down the same path as Pocket. Annoying but easy to disable.

If we can't even get OLED black theme on this very forum how could you possibly convince Mozilla to have OLED black as a default option?
In fact, Windows actually used to have full black themes back then but chose to disable it.

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

@williamcll Darkreader can fix this.

Sadly dark reader doesn't change reader mode. 

 

I have been a long time Opera mobile user due to them offering pure black dark mode and reader mode. Recently they removed the reader mode in an update and I left for Firefox.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

"AI" has become "In the cloud" of this era.  They're adding a better, more robust Search Feature. That's all this era of "AI" is for the end user.  I used to like AI stuff a lot more when it was applied to interesting tasks.  We've enter the phase of "we're adding this feature because Google's click through payments aren't good anymore".

[PocketNerd]

14 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

 They're adding a better, more robust Search Feature.

Except it's not

[LAwLz]

11 hours ago, Brinstead said:

Is "AI" even a good thing to have in a browser?

I think it can be good.

The two obvious features I can think of would be:

1) Summarizing articles. This is a perfect use case for these LLMs because there is very little risk of them making shit up when pulling from a limited data set.

 

2) Being able to search for things on a page without having to specify the exact word. So instead of writing "benchmark" to find all the mentions of the word "benchmark", a cool feature would be to just type "performance results" and it will jump to the benchmark section even if the word "performance result" isn't used anywhere in the title.

 

 

Brave, the browser I use, has an AI feature in it but I can't say I have used it a lot. mostly because I can never remember the keyboard shortcut for it, and I haven't remembered it even existed for the last 2 months or so.

(Apparently the shortcut is Ctrl+b, because it opens the sidebar and the AI "Leo" is located in there, or you can just access it from the address bar).

[RejZoR]

Firefox uses local language models for offline translations. I'm using it quite regularly and it works really well. If it's that kind of Ai, then I'm for it.

[cmndr]

18 hours ago, da na said:

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

I could see it being nice to click an icon and type. There's a bit of a lag in opening webpages and that friction is enough for me to notice. 

What I'd love to have is the ability to type one question in and get results from 20 different LLMs in one go. 

[Kisai]

On 2/14/2024 at 5:42 PM, da na said:

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

Who uses a LLM to get an answer when google will return a more correct answer 100% of the time.

The problem is that the latest get-rich-quick scheme is to flood google with chatgpt, dalle and other kind of generative AI garbage full of ads so finding the true source becomes difficult or impossible.

 

You know what would be a good way to bring trust back the web? Have a prefech mechanism that reads the index page and looks for third party domain links and goes "this site may invade your privacy due to third party links" and offer to disable all the links proactively. I'm sure google would LOVE that.

 

I'm just asking to delete those google search results that contain garbage, which is easily noticed by looking for the various low-effort ways ads are inserted on the page.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

On 2/14/2024 at 7:42 PM, da na said:

Genuinely who uses AI integration in the browser, and how much time does it truly save versus... going to chat.openai.com?

having bard summaries for searches is actually incredibly nice sometimes, since they autogenerate when i search something, and much faster than going to a separate website and making a good prompt.

[hu4d]

On 2/15/2024 at 3:05 PM, RejZoR said:

Firefox uses local language models for offline translations

Sauce?

[RejZoR]

8 hours ago, hu4d said:

Sauce?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/neural-machine-translation-engine-for-firefox-translations-add-on/

 

It has been around for so long they don't even mention machine learning or neural engine anymore now, they just say it's offline translation. And it works really well, I use it for German to English since my German is quite rusty and it has worked really well on everything I've used it for. And I don't have to send anything to Google Translate servers...

[Quackers101]

local AI models is so much more fun, be it using it offline or online, to various needs or tasks. like language situations.

but do hate the business side of firefox going for trends, but I guess understandable for trying to gain something in the space.

I do like some of their options, but too expensive but at least "more trustworthy" options on offer.

 

but sad to see that about vpn's, relay's, etc. something that can become a must have.

 

Safe browsing should be encouraged and the future around browsing the web. also some is not related to their monitoring services, since its the "new shiny one".  Mozilla Monitor Plus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58rHrzPmzic

[Fasterthannothing]

Someone brought up an interesting point on another news story about AI that I was reading. AI has all the tell tail signs of the dot com bubble. We are approaching the same point where the value is being ballooned if a company just mentions AI. Will the bubble be as  catastrophic who knows my guess is it won't be good but AI is also being used to cut jobs so maybe it will balance out.

[Senzelian]

I wonder why they felt the need to add AI to Firefox. Not even Chrome has any AI implementation yet. Goes to show how "big" AI really is.

[BiG StroOnZ]

26 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I wonder why they felt the need to add AI to Firefox. Not even Chrome has any AI implementation yet. Goes to show how "big" AI really is.

 

You can use AI in any browser for free by going here: 

 

Copilot with GPT-4 (bing.com)

[ToboRobot]

27 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I wonder why they felt the need to add AI to Firefox. Not even Chrome has any AI implementation yet. Goes to show how "big" AI really is.

Because the current hype is add AI to everything.  Kids toys?  add AI!  Enterprise software?  Add AI! 

Minimum wage jobs? Just add robots and AI!

Barely functioning government?  Can we get an AI for that? 

[WereCat]

1 hour ago, ToboRobot said:

Barely functioning government?  Can we get an AI for that? 

You can already probably swap barely functioning government with a barely functioning AI without any disadvantages.

 

1 hour ago, Senzelian said:

I wonder why they felt the need to add AI to Firefox. Not even Chrome has any AI implementation yet. Goes to show how "big" AI really is.

They do not have any AI in Firefox.

"Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml."

 

And Google is likely working on adding AI to Chrome as well as does Microsoft to Edge and Apple to Safari.

I feel like it does not matter right now for almost anybody but in future if FF will be the only Browser without AI it may be a deal breaker as it will lack something that other browsers will have.

 

The problem with Firefox is that there are people who like it as it is and will complain about them adding stuff because they consider it stupid and then there is another group of people that will call them out on lack of innovation if they just keep improving what they already have and not add new stuff.

[Mark Kaine]

On 2/15/2024 at 2:51 AM, FlyingPotato_is_taken said:

hey mozilla,

I have a brilliant idea on how you could improve the android browser in 5 minutes: in darkmode make it black. The grey looks like background glow on OLED displays.

 

I hope AI will go down the same path as Pocket. Annoying but easy to disable.

why? chrome cant be black either,  its only fair! a level playing field! 

 

(yes yes it can be black but then you can't have a custom background picture... its infuriating! )

[Mark Kaine]

On 2/17/2024 at 2:43 PM, Fasterthannothing said:

Someone brought up an interesting point on another news story about AI that I was reading. AI has all the tell tail signs of the dot com bubble. We are approaching the same point where the value is being ballooned if a company just mentions AI. Will the bubble be as  catastrophic who knows my guess is it won't be good but AI is also being used to cut jobs so maybe it will balance out.

well that's all that 'AI' really is, but they cant exactly name it 'money printing machine' that would be too on the nose, dont you think?