alt Hacker NewsNo AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter
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> Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic.
This really weakens the point of the post. It strikes me as a: we just don't like those AIs. Bergamot's model's behavior is no more or less auditable or a black box than an LLM's behavior. If you really want to go dig into a Llama 7B model, you definitely can. Even Bergamot's underlying model has an option to be transformer-based: https://marian-nmt.github.io/docs/
The premise of non-corporate AI is respectable but I don't understand the hate for LLMs. Local inference is laudable, but being close-minded about solutions is not interesting.
I just want FireFox to focus on building an absolutely awesome plugin API that exposes as much power and flexibility as possible - with the best possible security sandbox and permissions model to go with it.
Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.
This whole backlash to firefox wanting to introduce AI feels a little knee-jerky. We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into.. and if so, if would cut down on the majority of the knee jerk complaints. I think people want AI in the browser, they just don't want it to be the big-corp hosted AI...
[Update]: as I posted below, sample use cases would include translation, article summarization, asking questions from a long wiki page... and maybe with some agents built-in as well: parallelizing a form filling/ecom task, having the agent transcribe/translate an audio/video in real time, etc
If people could get into the habit of using "AI*" when they explicitly mean "LLM" but they have to say "AI" because hype, that would be nice.
Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.
I switched to Waterfox about a year ago because my poor old linux box just couldn't keep up with the latest Firefox version (especially the Snap package! I literally unusable for me) and I am very thankful that they aren't going to be including any of the LLM crud that Mozilla has been talking up.
I get the utility that this stuff can have for certain types of activities but on top of not having great hardware to run the dang things, I just don't find any of the proposed use-cases that compelling for me personally.
It's just nice that the totalizing self-insistence of AI tech hasn't gobbled up every corner of the tech space, even if those crevices and niches are getting smaller by the day.
This feature can be easily disabled with policies:
https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai
https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences
https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/browser/app/profil...
https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/modules/libpref/in...
> Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you... Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future.
> If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along.
This is basically their train of thought: provide something different for people who truly need it. There's nothing to criticize about.
However, let's don't forget that other browsers can remove/disable AI features just as fast as they add them. If Waterfox wants to be *more than just an alternative* (a.k.a. be a competitor), they needs discover what people actually need and optimize heavily on that. But this is hard to do because people don't show their true motives.
Maybe one day, it turned out that people do just want an AI that "think for them". That would be awkward, to say the least.
Also see related statement by vivaldi: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2000874212999799198
A browser is a tool that allows you to browse the internet. It should be able to display HTML elements, and stuff.
LLMs are also a tool, but it is not necessary for web browsing. It should be installed into a browser as extension, or integrated as such, so it should be quite easily enabled, or disabled. Surely it should not be intertwined with the browser in a meaningful way imho.
> AI browsers are proliferating
Are they, though? I get bombarded by AI ads very frequently and I have yet to see anything from those "AI browsers" mentioned on the article.
How do you disable the telemetry in Waterfox? It looks like they get their funding because they partnered with an Ad company. Do I just need to change the default search?
Did Firefox already add AI into Tabs? Today I just got my first 'Tab Grouping' and it says "Nightly uses AI to read your Open Tabs". That's the worst way to do grouping ever... just group hierarchically based on where it opened from...
The problem with this is integration: no one would complain if it was an official plugin/extension, but integrating this plugin into Firefox is forced and unexpected decision. Firefox telemetry,labs/experiments and server-dependent features will lose it marketshare slowly in favor of local-only browsers that don't have online dependencies or forced bloatware. Like many i've switched long ago to LibreWolf.
“Even if you can disable individual AI features, the cognitive load of monitoring an opaque system that’s supposedly working on your behalf would be overwhelming.”
99.9% of people haven’t ever had one single thought about how their software works. I don’t think they will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. Quite the opposite.
I was a FF driver for ages and now making the switch to Chrome based browser simple because it's faster and websites are all tested against Chrome / Safari. I see both of these issues manifest IRL on a weekly basis. Why do I want to burn up CPU cycles and second using FF when Chromium is literally faster.
if kagi can make a search engine that charges users, why dont we have a 1$/month open source browser whose code can be verified but people pay to use monthly?
With this, people will come here and the go. I mean consider the example of many GNU/Linux users I know who use GNU/Linux (or for them Linux means Ubuntu) system and can ask them to try out Waterfox. But, about installation - can't we have .deb? I know we can easily install from tarball and then setup the .desktop file and then adjust the icon to properly display, and what not...But, Can we make a bit simpler to try?
I completely agree with the main sentiment, which is - I want the browser to be a User Agent and nothing else. I don´t need a crappy, un-reliable intermediary between the already perfectly fine UA and the Internet.
how is adding ai chat different than asking search engine? I think mozilla wants to make sure that it gets some cut for sending queries to ai similar to their existing revenue model where they get cut for sending it to google. Similar to SE's users should have a choice to use any ai or not.
On Windows Mozilla can't even handle disabling hardware acceleration, a.k.a. the GPU, from its settings page. Sure you can toggle the button but it doesn't work as verified in the task manager. What hope is there that they can be trusted to disable AI then? It's a feature that I'd never want enabled. When that "feature" comes out users will be forced to find a fork without the feature.
I guess it's nice for non-technical people who don't know how to use `about:config` but beyond that I don't really see the need. Hopefully adding that extra layer of indirection doesn't mean the users will have to wait too long for security patches.
Does anyone have more information on this sentence from the second paragraph?:
> Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.
>A browser is meant to be a user agent, more specifically, your agent on the web.
at this point it’s more so a sandbox runtime bordering an OS, but okay
Waterfox just released version 6.6.6. Are we sure it is not evil?
As I read the post by MrAlex94, I noticed a remark that the browser Chrome is good as a user agent. To me, that's terrific! Looks like I'll have to consider Chrome again.`
Here are what I find as reasons to scream about Mozilla:
Popups:
(a) Several times a day, my attention and concentration get interrupted by, for me, the unwelcome announcement that there is a new version I can download. A new version can have changes I don't like and genuine bugs. Sure, I could keep a copy of my favorite version from history, but that is system management mud wrestling and interruption of my work.
(b) Now I get told several times a day that my computer and cell phone can share access to a Web page. In this action Mozilla covers up what that page was showing I wanted it to show. No thanks. When I'm at my computer, AMD 8 core processor, all my files and software tools, and 1 Gbps optical fiber connection to the Internet and looking at a Web page, I want nothing to do with a cell phone's presentation of a, that, Web page.
(c) Some URLs are a dozen lines long and Mozilla finds ways to present such URLs with all their lines and pursue clearly their main objective -- cover up the desired content.
Mozilla needs to make their covering up, changing, the screen optional or just eliminated.
Want me to donate? You've mentioned as little as $10. Deal: Raise the $10 by a factor of 5 AND quit covering up my content and interrupting my work, and we've got a deal.
I still can’t give them money, so what’s the point? Just like with Mozilla, they rely on sponsors and you are the product.
I, for one, am dreaming of AI assisted ad removal, content summaries, bookmarks automatic classification...
I just downloaded WaterFox, it looks nice.
When they say "AI browsers are proliferating." and "Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers." what does that mean? What's an "AI Browser", and are they really gaining significant market share? For what?
I found this (1) that suggests that several "AI Browsers" exist, which is "proliferating" in a sense.
1) https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla...
...and keep your hand up if you've ever donated to Firefox
"...trust from other large, imporant [sic] third parties which in turn has given Waterfox users access to protected streaming services via Widevine."
The black box objection disqualifies Widevine.
I do think dipping your toes into the future is worth it. If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. But I don't think this is any more dangerous than giving people a browser in the first place. They have already done enough to shoot themselves in the foot enough.
> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well.
Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense.
I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.