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.
LLMs being applied to everything under the sun feels like we're solving problems that have other solutions, and the answers aren't necessarily correct or accurate. I don't need a dubiously accurate summary of an article in English, I can read and comprehend it just fine. The downside is real and the utility is limited.
The trouble is that statistical MT (the things that became neural net MT) started achieving better quality metrics than rule-based MT sometime around 2008 or 2010 (if I remember correctly), and the distance between them has widened since then. Rule-based systems have gotten a little better each year, while statistical systems have gotten a lot better each year, and are also now receiving correspondingly much more investment.
The statistical systems are especially good at using context to disambiguate linguistic ambiguities. When a word has multiple meanings, human beings guess which one is relevant from overall context (merging evidence upwards and downwards from multiple layers within the language understanding process!). Statistical MT systems seem to do something somewhat similar. Much as human beings don't even perceive how we knew which meaning was relevant (but we usually guessed the right one without even thinking about it), these systems usually also guess the right one using highly contextual evidence.
Linguistic example sentences like "time flies like an arrow" (my linguistics professor suggested "I can't wait for her to take me here") are formally susceptible of many different interpretations, each of which can be considered correct, but when we see or hear such sentences within a larger context, we somehow tend to know which interpretation is most relevant and so most plausible. We might never be able to replicate some of that with consciously-engineered rulesets!
(And also things that have other solutions, but where "find and apply that other solution" has way more overhead than "just ask an LLM".)
There is no deterministic way to "summarize this research paper, then evaluate whether the findings are relevant and significant for this thing I'm doing right now", or "crawl this poorly documented codebase, tell me what this module does". And the alternative is sinking your own time in it - while you could be doing something more important or more fun.
A nefarious model would work that way though. The owner wouldn't want it to be obvious. It'd only change the meaning of some sentences some of the time, but enough to nudge the user's understanding of the translated text to something that the model owner wants.
For example, imagine a model that detects the sentiment of text about Russian military action, and automatically translates it to something a more positive if it's especially negative, but only 20% of the time (maybe ramping up as the model ages). A user wouldn't know, and a someone testing the model for accuracy might assume it's just a poor translation. If such a model became popular it could easily shift the perception of the public a few percent in the owner's preferred direction. That'd be plenty to change world politics.
Likewise for a model translating contracts, or laws, or anything else where the language is complex and requires knowledge of both the language and the domain. Imagine a Chinese model that detects someone trying to translate a contract from Chinese to English, and deliberately modifies any clause about data privacy to change it to be more acceptable. That might be paranoia on my part, but it's entirely possible on a technical level.
If the purpose is to read someone's _writing_, then I'm going to read it, for the sheer joy of consuming the language. Nothing will take that from me.
If the purpose is to get some critical piece of information I need quickly, then no, I'd rather ask an AI questions about a long document than read the entire thing. Documentation, long email threads, etc. all lend themselves nicely to the size of a context window.
If something has actual substance I'll watch the whole thing, but that's maybe 10% of videos I find in experience.
Citation: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...
I mainly use a custom prompt using ChatGPT via the Raycast app and the Raycast browser extension.
That said, I don’t feel comfortable with the level of AI being shoved into browsers by their vendors.
If it does interest me then I can explore it. I guess I do this once a week or so, not a lot.
Most recently, a new ISP contract: because it's both low stakes enough where I don't care much about inaccuracies (it's a bog standard contract from a run of the mill ISP), there's basically no information in there that the cloud vendor doesn't already have (if they have my billing details) but also where I'm curious about whether anything might jump out, all while not really wanting to read the 5 pages of the thing.
Just went back to that, it got both all of the main items (pricing, contract terms, my details) correctly, but also the annoying fine print (that I referenced, just in case). Also works pretty well across languages, though that depends on the model in question a bunch.
I feel like if browsers or whatever get the UX of this down, people will upload all sorts of data into those vendors that they normally shouldn't. I also think that with nuanced enough data, we'll eventually have the LLM equivalent of Excel messing up data due to some formatting BS.
On a purely technical play, you’re right that I’m drawing a distinction that may not hold up purely on technical grounds. Maybe the better framing is: I trust constrained, single purpose models with somewhat verifiable outputs (seeing text go in, translated text go out, compare its consistency) more than I trust general purpose models with broad access to my browsing context, regardless of whether they’re both neural networks under the hood.
WRT to the “scope”, maybe I have picked up the wrong end of the stick with what Mozilla are planning to do - but they’ve already picked all the low hanging fruit with AI integration with the features you’ve mentioned and the fact they seem to want to dig their heels in further, at least to me, signals that they want deeper integration? Although who knows, the post from the new CEO may also be a litmus test to see what the response to that post elicits, and then go from there.
Then I thought, "Aha! Surely LibreWolf is the one I'm thinking of!"
Turns out no, it's a third one! It's PaleMoon...
From this point of view, uBlock Origin is also effectively un-auditable.
Or your point about them maybe imagining AI as non-local proprietary models might be the only thing that makes this make sense. I think even technical people are being suckered by the marketing that "AI" === ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini style cloud-hosted proprietary models connected to chat UIs.
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 could say it's equally close minded not to sympathize with this position, or various reasoning behind it. For me, I feel that my spoken language is effected by those I interact with, and the more exposed someone is to a bot, the more they will speak like that bot, and I don't want my language to be pulled towards the average redditor, so I choose not to interact with LLMs (I still use them for code generation, but I wouldn't if I used code for self expression. I just refuse to have a back and forth conversation on any topic. It's like that family that tried raising a chimp alongside a baby. The chimp did pick up some human like behavior, but the baby human adapted to chimp like behavior much faster, so they abandoned the experiment.)
I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no feelings). It can be annoying when you bounce the third idea off the thing and it confidently replies with wrong instructions.
Anyway, I’ve been less worried about running local models, mostly just because I’m running them CPU-only. The capacity is just so limited, they don’t enter the uncanny valley where they can become truly annoying.
I have no opinion on not wanting to converse with a machine, that is a perfectly valid preference. I am referring more to the blog post's position where it seems to advocate against itself.
It's mostly knee-jerk reaction from having AI forced upon us from every direction, not just the ones that make sense
(It's weird how people can be so anti-anti-AI, but then when someone takes a middle position, suddenly that's wrong too.)
The focused purpose, I think, gives it more of a "purpose built tool" feel over "a chatbot that might be better at some tasks than others" generic entity. There's no fake persona to interact with, just an algorithm with data in and out.
The latter portion is less a technical and more an emotional nuance, to be sure, but it's closer to how I prefer to interact with computers, so I guess it kinda works on me... If that were the limit of how they added AI to the browser.
> 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.
Like I said, I'm all for local models for the exact reasons you mentioned. I also love the auditability. It strikes me as strange that the blog post would write off the architecture as the problem instead of the fact that it's not local.
The part that doesn't sit well to me is that Mozilla wants to egress data. It being an LLM I really don't care.
A local model will have fewer filters applied to the output, but I can still only evaluate the input/output pairs.
It’s insane this has to be pointed out to you but here we go.
Hammers are the best, they can drive nails, break down walls and serve as a weapon. From now on the military will, plumber to paratrooper, use nothing but hammers because their combined experience of using hammers will enable us to make better hammers for them to do their tasks with.
Firefox could have an entire section dedicated to torturing digital puppies built into the platform and... Ok, well, that's too far, but they could have a costco warehouse full of AI crap and I wouldn't mind at all as long as it was off by default and preferably not even downloaded to the system unless I went in and chose to download it.
I know respecting user preference doesn't line their pockets but neither does chasing users down and shoving services they never asked for and explicitly do not want into their faces.
An ideal translation is one which round-trips to the same content, which at least implies a consistency of representation.
No such example or even test as far as I know exists for any of the summary or search AIs since they expressly lose data in processing (I suppose you could construct multiple texts with the same meanings and see if they summarize equivalently - but it's certainly far harder to prove anything).
To me the difference between something like AI translation and an LLM is that the former is a useful feature and the latter is an annoyance. I want to be able to translate text across languages in my web browser. I don't want a chat bot for my web browser. I don't want a virtual secretary - and even if I did, I wouldn't want it limited to the confines of my web browser.
It's not about whether there is machine learning, LLMs, or any kind of "AI" involved. It's about whether the feature is actually useful. I'm sick of AI non-features getting shoved in my face, begging for my attention.
Then everyone who wants AI can have it and those that don't .... don't.
At some point Firefox added these gaps on the URL bar, every single time I install Firefox I have to go out of my way to delete the spacing, it drives me up a wall.
That's literally my entire use case for using firefox.
Did that achieve the last CEOs goals? Presumably if it did they'll use that route again.
Have Google required a default 'on' for Gemini use?
The current trajectory of products with integrated online worries me, due to the fact that the average computer/phone user isn't as tech-savvy as the average HN reader, to the point where they are unable to toggle stuff they genuinely never asked for, but they begrudgingly accept them because they're... there.
My mother complained about AI mode on Google Chrome, and the "press tab" on the address bar, but she's old and doesn't even know how to connect to the Wi-Fi. Are we safe to assume that she belongs to the percentage of Google Chrome users that they embrace AI, based on the fact that she doesn't know how to turn it off, and there's no easy way to go about it?
I'm willing to bet that Google's reports will assume so, and demonstrate a wide adoption of AI by Chrome users to stakeholders, which will be leveraged as a fact that everyone loves it.
[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
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)
Putting back the home button, removing the tabs overview button, disabling sponsored suggestions in the toolbar, putting the search bar back, removing the new AI toolbar, disabling the "It's been a while since you've used Firefox, do you want to cleanup your profile?", disabling the long-click tab preview, disabling telemetry, etc. etc.
We have to put this all in the context. Firefox is trying to diversify their revenue away from google search. They are trying to provide users with a Modern browser. This means adding the features that people expect like AI integration and its a nice bonus if the AI companies are willing to pay for that.
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.
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!!!
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.
Now, personally, I would like to have sane defaults, where I can toggle stuff on and off, but we all know which way the wind blows in this case.
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 expect a business to make or maintain a suite of local model features in a browser free to download without monetizing the feature somehow. If said monetization strategy might mean selling my data or having the local model bring in ads, for example, the value of a local model goes down significantly IMO.
Personally I'd prefer if Firefox didn't ship with 20 gigs of model weights.
All this would allow for a further breakdown of language barriers, and maybe the communities of various languages around the world could interact with each other much more on the same platforms/posts
Meanwhile, Mozilla canned the servo and mdn projects which really did provide value for their user base.
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.
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.
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
In general, how else would people "learn" about a feature unless it was enabled by default or the product nagged them?
I would say it is nearly as easy as installing waterfox or some other privacy focused fork of Firefox.
... Mozilla has re-enabled AI-related toggles that people have disabled. (I've heard this from others and observed it myself.) They also keep adding new ones that aren't controlled by a master switch. They're getting pretty user-hostile.
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.
If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.
The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome.
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.
> 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.
Looks like their independent now, nice.
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.
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.
Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
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...
> Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome.
https://labs.google/disco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240952
"* The asterisk acknowledges that “AI” has become a catch-all term. Machine learning tools like local translation engines (Bergamot) are valuable and transparent. Large language models, in their current black-box form, are neither."
And Bergamot is also a transformer based language model.
Personally, I'd love a paid for high quality browser that serves me rather than sneakily trying to get me to look at ads.
I think the challenge is that a browser is an incredibly difficult and large thing to build and maintain. So there aren't many wholly new browsers in existence, and therefore not very many business models being tried out.
Full agreement that I'd pay for such a thing- I have a browser and a terminal open non-stop during my workday. It's an important tool and I'd easily pay for a better offering if that was an option.
at this point it’s more so a sandbox runtime bordering an OS, but okay
What do you say about the following link, then?
I agree it's counter-evidence right now, and I think there has been a way to donate for a long time now (just to "mozilla", not "firefox" or setting any restrictions), but I'm not sure what the historical option has been...
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.
That said, they're admittedly terrible about keeping their documentation updated, letting users know about added/depreciated settings, and they've even been known to go in and modify settings after you've explicitly changed them from defaults, so the PSA isn't entirely unjustified.
Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.
People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.
The black box objection disqualifies Widevine.
It's more likely it will try to kill us by talking depressed people into suicide and providing virtual ersatz boyfriends/girlfriends to replace real human relationships, what is a functional equivalent to cyber-neutering, given people can't have children by dating LLMs.
In many other areas, there are zero "no AI" options at all.
