They are not "wanting" to introduce AI, they already did.

And now we have:

- A extra toolbar nobody asked for at the side. And while it contains some extra features now, I'm pretty much sure they added it just to have some prominent space to add a "Open AI Chatbot" button to the UI. And it is irritating as fuck because it remembers its state per window. So if you have one window open with the sidebar open, and you close it on another, then move to the other again and open a new window it thinks "hey, I need to show a sidebar which my user never asked for!". Also I believe it is also opening itselves sometimes when previously closed. I don't like it at all.

- A "Ask an AI Chatbot" option which used to be dynamically added and caused hundreds of clicks on wrong items on the context menu (due to muscle memory), because when it got added the context menu resizes. Which was also a source of a lot of irritation. Luckily it seems they finally managed to fix this after 5 releases or so.

Oh, and at the start of this year they experimented with their own LLM a bit in the form of Orbit, but apparently that project has been shitcanned and memoryholed, and all current efforts seem to be based on interfacing with popular cloud based AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Mistral. (likely for some $$$ in return, like the search engine deal with Google)

>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...

Because the phrase "AI first browser" is meaningless corpospeak - it can be anything or nothing and feels hollow. Reminiscent of all past failures of firefox.

I just want a good browser that respects my privacy and lets me run extensions that can hook at any point of handling page, not random experiments and random features that usually go against privacy or basically die within short time-frame.

> [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

I don't want any of this built into my web browser. Period.

This is coming from someone who pays for a Claude Max subscription! I use AI all the time, but I don't want it unless I ask for it!!!

> 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

Personally I'd prefer if Firefox didn't ship with 20 gigs of model weights.

This 100% -- the AI features already in Firefox, for the most part, rely on local models. (Right now there is translation and tab-grouping, IIRC.)

Local based AI features are great and I wish they were used more often, instead of just offloading everything to cloud services with questionable privacy.

I don't feel like I want AI in my browser. I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Maybe translation?

The ux changes and features remind us of pocket and all the other low value features that come with disruptive ux changes as other commenters have noted.

Meanwhile, Mozilla canned the servo and mdn projects which really did provide value for their user base.

I just know I've already had to chase down AI in Firefox I definitely did not ask for or activate, and I don't recall consenting to.

>I think people want AI in the browser

I don't. And the whole idea of Firefox's marketing is that it won't force things on me. Ofc course om frustrated. My core browser should serve pages and manage said pages. Anything else should be an option.

I'm beyond tired of being told my preferences, especially by people with incentives to extract money out of me.

It doesn't matter what they exactly want to do, what it matters is they're wasting resources on it instead of keeping the ... browsing part ... up to date.

There is also the matter of how training data was licensed to create these models. Local or not, it’s still based on stolen content. And really what transformative use case is there to have AI in the browser - none of the ones currently available step outside gimmicks that quickly get old and don’t really add value.

I want the people who make Firefox to make decisions about Firefox based on what users have been asking for instead of based on what a CEO of a for-profit decides is still not going to make them any money, just like every other plan that got pitched in the last 10 years that failed to turn their losing streak around.

It's not a knee-jerk reaction to "AI", it's a perfectly reasonable reaction to Mozilla yet again saying they're going to do something that the user base doesn't work, won't regain them marketshare, and that's going to take tens of thousands of dev hours away from working on all the things that would make Firefox a better browser, rather than a marginally less nonprofitable product.

I don't think a locally hosted LLM would be powerful enough for the supposed "agentic browsing" scenarios - at least if the browser is still supposed to run on average desktop PCs.

>We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into..

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech

it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:

- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching

- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies

- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla

with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software

the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life

my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position

firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement

the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future

We're still in bubble-period hyper-polarized discourse: "shoehorn AI into absolutely everything and ram it down your throat" vs "all AI is bad and evil and destroying the world."

I don't want any AI in anything apart from the Copilot app, where the AI that I use is. I don't want it in my IDE. I don't want it in my browser. I don't want it in my messaging client. I don't want it in my email app. I want it in the app, where it is, where I can choose to use it, give it what it needs, and leave at at bloody that.

> I think people want AI in the browser

Sorry but no. I dont want another humans work summarized by some tool that's incapable of reasoning. It could get the whole meaning of the text wrong. Same with real time translation. Languages are things even humans get wrong regularly and I dont want some biased tool to do it for me.

I don't want to have to max out my gpu to browse reddit.