They’re not just giving these AI companies your data…
It’s an optional feature, and you would choose which model you use. If you choose not to use it, or disable the feature, nobody will recieve your data. If you want a browser without these features, Librewolf will likely be a safe choice, as I don’t seem them adding this.
The only active AI feature is the automatic alt text one, and that’s entirely local. The second one is a sidebar that will just open AI chat websites, which you could already do by just, ya know, looking up the webpages the regular way. No data is getting sent anywhere so far.
No, llamafile Is local, and it could do multiple search engine for you, or skip results contained in the first pages which are usually only ads or there because they pay to be there. And it could start searching the fediverse too
Know what’s even more opt in? An official extension. Installed only if someone wants it.
I switched to LibreWolf and Mull a few months ago in preparation for this. I’ll come back to Firefox if the investors pull their collective heads from their asses.
I think it makes sense. I like ChatGPT and I appreciate having easy access to it. What I really wish is the option to use local models instead. I realize most people don’t have machines that can tokenize quickly enough but for those that do…
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
Looks like the “local AI only” idea was purged in favor of some Big Tech stuff that can give Mozilla some fat cash for promoting their services! Mozilla’s second (or third idk at this point lol) downfall is looking really strong with all their recent decisions. WebKit is another independent engine that still doesn’t seem to suck in terms of enshittification but it’s basically not used anywhere except Apple ecosystem. Chromium is getting a full monopoly yay.
Well I’m guessing they actually did testing on local AI using a 4GB and 8GB RAM laptop and realized it would be an awful user experience. It’s just too slow.
I do self host several AI applications for myself on a low end device and I think for most lowend even mid devices local AI is unfeasible. Nowadays is too much resource heavy and times are too long without high end devices.
For my computer generating a description of a picture (one of the firefox new features) could easily take up to 5-10 minutes with the cpu at 100%. That’s just not viable for doing while browsing.
Anyway I would love for firefox to open source the server side of this. So in case someone have s computer powerful enough they could do it locally if they want to.
WebKit does exist for Linux, Gnome Web has been quite a nice experience however it still lacks support for most extensions (however some Firefox extensions do work). The real world performance is still a bit lacking but its close to Firefox on paper and as it continues to update I will probably swap to it. For now its a nice way for me to test if my websites will break on macs (spoiler, WebKit still lacks some stuff).
I know about that. I used to use Epiphany myself. The problem is that it’s unpopular, still not nearly as good as the other options and there’s no cross-platform support. The last one is a big problem because 90% of the market uses Android or Windows.
Cross platform and popular I agree with. Having it in a state where it could be the default for gnome distros would help with popularity. However I think at least in latest versions its pretty comparable to other browsers at least Firefox. Main issue is there isn’t as much extensions that work with it. Considering the pace it is improving though I think it won’t be long till it could be viable alternative at least on Linux, maybe it might get ported some day idk.
I have a pretty slow machine and GNOME Web is unusable on it. The performance is not comparable to Firefox or Chromium. Extensions are very important for regular people apparently (judging from old Firefox Play Store reviews). Also Firefox and its derivatives are known for advanced privacy features that GNOME Web doesn’t have and likely will never have because GNOME is about extreme simplicity by all costs.
I like GNOME Web and I really can see myself installing it on an old person’s computer because of awesomely simple UI. But it’s not for most people and I’m afraid that without commercial support there won’t be any good regular browsers based on WebKit. I wish engine-specific features didn’t exist. Everything would be so simple without them.
That’s fair, I haven’t tried it on low end/older hardware. I only just found performance good enough in the 46 release so I’ve only tested on my high and middle end system. I have some n200 hardware arriving soon and I might give it a go on that.
Advanced privacy and security I agree with and that’s the main reason I don’t use it daily personally. I think better extension support would be a good step in enhancing that even if they keep the base simple. There is also non trivial issues such as fingerprinting which is going to be a lot easier on a browser with so little users.
Firefox does currently have a few more options and I don’t see Gnome Web getting that ootb any time soon. Granted half of firefox’s options these days is to disable telemetry from Mozilla, the actual user exposed options isn’t huge (outside of about:config). Gnome does have gsettings which could serve a similar usage as already seen with enabling web extensions.
I don’t think it will be mainstream any time soon not until Linux is or they support other oses. But I want to be optimistic on how it will be for Linux usage especially with the tablet and mobile scene starting to take shape and Gnome Web being one of the most viewport responsive browsers.
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."
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
We literally agree with each other, and yet you’re still arguing. The reason why it’s a scam, is because people sell it like some kind of a godsend, when it’s literally not used in the way it is intended to be used. When it is, that’s great. When it’s trained properly, that’s even better. But that’s not the reality
I made a generalization based on the abundance of comments from people saying they don’t want AI. Your desires may not be the desires of the majority of users.
Or maybe it’s just a common fallacy. Like argumentum ad populum.
It’s not. Saying a bunch of people don’t want something because a bunch of people are saying they don’t want it isn’t argumentum ad populum. I never made an assessment about whether AI was good or bad.
If you want to argue that Lemmy doesn’t represent users at large, or that the people complaining about AI are a loud minority, go for it. But the vast majority of comments on anything AI related seem opposed to it.
Using the comments from Lemmy is clearly a case of selection bias. It would be like running a poll at a gym to see how many people think exercise is important. Or asking lemmy users if Linux is better than Windows. “The people I hang around have the same opinion as me” isn’t really a good litmus test for “does this actually represent public opinion.”
I’m with you on this one. I love Lemmy, but it’s a small community here and skews towards a very specific foss tech nerd demographic that doesn’t represent the general population in any way. It seems like most users are aware of that but not everybody is self-aware enough to realize that. I like trying out AI features, I like to see them be integrated into software so they can be more useful. They’re not perfect at all but just because they’re not perfect doesn’t mean they should be abandoned in their entirety.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.
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