@thibaultamartin Agreed, I am still using FF because it's still the least bad and most maintained browser but this will be what makes me jump ship eventually. Lots of people are less tolerant than me and already have. If at least they had one master switch to disable all that, but no, it's like 7 settings at this point and they tend to reset when it updates...
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@thibaultamartin
No, I stopped using firefox exactly because of such decisions - in detail when they started to collect Data for advertising one year ago. There are better solutions with better performance. If I want to use AI I don't want to have it included to systems where I don't need it.
@thibaultamartin I'm curious, how LibreWolf will act on this.
@thibaultamartin I haven't recommended Firefox to anyone in recent years.
@thibaultamartin their values are sucking the wang of Google (their primary donor).
Internally they use gmail instead of thunderbird.
for all those who didn't yet know...
I wanted to write a more nuanced follow up but @anildash already wrote it. I’d recommend everyone who boosted this to have a read.
The TLDR for me is
- Numbers say people do want AI
- Mozilla has a role to play in educating people about AI, to protect their privacy
- Mozilla is terrible at announcing such features, and seems to lack coordination overall
@thibaultamartin I strongly suspect @anildash's piece is plagued by incurable optimism.
Re your TLDR:
* has Mozilla polled *their own users* to see what they think of AI? Not the ones they dream of capturing with these features, the ones that *actually* use it, and that they're currently bleeding left and right with their inane initiatives;
1/n
* Mozilla is not in the position to educate anyone about AI and privacy, not only because nobody uses their browser (2% market share and going *down*), but because their take on the whole business is incoherently schizophrenic *at best*;
2/n
* and the issue isn't that Mozilla fails at communication, it's that they're trying to put lipstick on a pig, and everybody can see that it's still a pig; they're following a trend of the moment that goes *clearly* against anything they *supposedly* stand (or used to stand) for, and trying to give it a poorly-applied varnish of pretend-ethics that scrapes before it's even touched;
they alienated their whole volunteer JPN l10n team, ffs: https://linuxiac.com/ai-controversy-forces-end-of-mozilla-japanese-sumo-community/
3/n
@thibaultamartin the
* their entire modus operanding in the last few years (at least) has been, outside of a couple of “performative” actions that died out as late as they were given lip service (see e.g. the short-lived history of mozilla.social), a consistent and constant betrayal of their core values, both within and outside of browser development;
4/n
The fact that a proprietary browser on a string budget like Vivaldi does a better job at representing the users' interests against GAFAM *despite using Google's rendering engine* says everything that needs to be said about Mozilla.
5/n
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@thibaultamartin @anildash People don't want AI. They want working software.
How a feature works underneath the hood is implementation details that have become glorified marketing buzzwords to fuel stock speculation.
Everyone love's apple's on device photo recognition and doesn't give a shit if it was OCR till 5 years ago or some LLM today.
The state of the world is sad.
@thibaultamartin they should just make Firefox a paid product
@thibaultamartin ai could have told them that.
@thibaultamartin
This post is hell-bent on contradicting itself.
> In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience.
Beach, please…
> We’re building a better browser, not an agenda
> Why is investing in AI important for Firefox?
Fallacy of own, transparent ideology.
> (…) we see a different path — one where AI serves as a trusted companion, (…)
AI can't be trusted, as by design it doesn't discern between instructions and data.
@thibaultamartin
I agree with your post 100%.
Just a request to all readers: Contact #mozilla directly and give them feedback to stop this stuff with #firefox
@thibaultamartin At this point I'm starting to suspect they're deliberately sabotaging Firefox for their corporate overlords.
> Mozilla announces more AI in Firefox, still failing to understand that at this point their market share is made of tech savvy people who do not want that.
Is it? Do you have numbers to back that up?
If so they're mostly using windows and not half of them an add-on: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
Are the "tech savy" users maybe just more vocal?
Doesn't matter if I'm happy what mozilla does here but this looks like a thib centric world view to me 😃 .
@agx that’s a well balanced response to a knee jerk reaction post. Thanks for the link, it’s useful!
I’m considering a more elaborate blog post called “Wow I’m entitled about Firefox” with a more nuanced view.
@thibaultamartin @s_bergmann Exactly. If I want AI I can also stick my hand in a pile of shit
@thibaultamartin
They HAD values. Make a browser. The best browser, that displays websites. I believe that's how it started, back when. Long gone days ...
@thibaultamartin Why don't they get it. Many of us find AI irritating and irrelevant. Even Microsoft has given us the choice to shift back to AI free MS 365 Classic. Because so many sybscribers were angry and the Australian government threatened to prosecute because consumers were not offered an AI free option at the old price.
@thibaultamartin I have no problem with them putting it in as long as they make it easy to disable like the zed editor. Zed has a single click to turn it on and off.
@thibaultamartin ok, time to move on from Firefox. Where to? There's endless browsers but not sure where to go. Open to ideas.
@thibaultamartin Waterfox, trying its best to put out the Fire.
@thibaultamartin well, Mozilla is bunch of greedy tech bro shitheads (alwas was), so this was inevitable...
@thibaultamartin After at least a decade I recently dumped Firefox for Vivaldi. If only switching continents was that easy...
@thibaultamartin One hard challenge I think is that, with hundreds of millions of users,
> their market share is made of tech savvy people who do not want that.
is still not exclusively true. Percentage-wise it might not be too much, but it's not that niche either.
@thibaultamartin What is the difference between what Mozilla does and what Brave does?
Even Brave has its own AI in the browser, yet that did not upset you.
Please explain the difference between them.
@thibaultamartin I've seen many people stopping their use of Firefox for browsers like Vivaldi lately 😐
@thibaultamartin - haven’t yet used one of those Firefox forks, but have used the user.js from Betterfox to limit damage.
Especially anything to do with AI.
@thibaultamartin i think i should stop donating to them. looks like big money giver want mozilla to make a shit product on purpose.
@thibaultamartin Looking forward to disabling this. Not looking forward to shopping for other browsers...
let them die, if there is nobody in the company in charge to prevent the execs to throw shit in the fan they do not deserve it, missing qualitymanagement has to be punished
@thibaultamartin While I partially agree with you, if their sign up page is to be believed, it will be opt-in.
And seeing as how you can use a local or different cloud model by toggling one config option in about:config - browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost, they could allow you to run a local model instead for this AI Window.
I don't have a problem with AI, if it's used as a tool, but I do have a problem with AI bullshit and how corporations make money from it by trying to inject it everywhere, because they know they'll make money from VCs.
But I'm hoping that this is Mozilla's way to strike a balance between what is probably a feature coming from the top, and still allowing some choice.
@thibaultamartin
Obviously the argument is Firefox wants to appel to new customers, but it's going about it the wrong way with AI.
@thibaultamartin
Many linux distributions still have firefox as default browser.
So they're aiming at the "can install linux but won't change default browser" demographic.
@thibaultamartin It's opt in right meaning it's not turn on by default?
@thibaultamartin I wonder if they're being forced to include Gemni per sugar daddy Google (Evil Corp)?
@thibaultamartin The discussion thread on Mozilla Connect is packed with replies from people begging Mozilla not to cram AI slop into their browser, so that's reassuring at least. If you wanna add your voice, the thread is here: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/m-p/109926
@thibaultamartin Would be nice if they would build a browser that didn't lose all of my open tabs every 6 months or so.
@thibaultamartin They aren’t chasing a fad. They’re chasing money. Mozilla is paid to put AI in the browser. The same way they’re paid to use Google as the default search engine.
@thibaultamartin y'know maybe mozilla could put their "ai" obsession to good use and finally give us the SpeechRecognition api we've needed in the browser for so long(what, 10 years?) but noooo sure useless llm link preview
@thibaultamartin
A lot of empty words explaining absolutely nothing and also this:
> In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience.
Did they not run the model to generare tab group names on everyone by default, draining the battery of people for un AI feature absolutely not forced on people?
RE: https://coywolf.com/news/productivity/the-best-chrome-browser-for-mac-isnt-chrome-its-helium/
Meanwhile, I’m actively looking for and using browsers that intentionally exclude AI.
@thibaultamartin@mamot.frIs Mozila better than the Google search engine?
@thibaultamartin as long as I can use about:config values to turn it off, I really don't care otherwise. There's too much going on in my country and life to really care about a silly browser, but I get it, it's upsetting.
I'm part of their userbase and I wouldn't mind if they were useful features that advance open source AI. Some of the stuff they've done, like llamafile, is useful in that respect.
So far all the _browser_ features I've seen that have shipped were half-baked, buggy, and without a clear user story, and I've disabled them all.
The "AI Window" concept sounds like they're trying to reinvent Open WebUI. That's a very high bar to clear.
@thibaultamartin The worst part is, the Mozilla foundation is big and fat. Switching away from Firefox (or codebase), requires similar means and resources. At least, if you want to keep the engine alive.
I’m not digging the chromium engine, but Firefox for me switched from preferred browser to least-awefull-until-something-better-arrives browser.
they should do things that enhance the web because that's where they are planted. they had so much money flowing in, never managed to put any of it to good use.
@thibaultamartin Nothing good will come from AI.
@thibaultamartin I recommend Firefox to non-techie friends who want AI browser :P
@thibaultamartin Jeez, Glad I've been moving things off Firefox this past week, and adopting #Waterfox. Without any hiccups so far, so it seems to be stable and useful as a daily driver.
They're digging themselves into a hole.
@thibaultamartin
The only thing I want to know about AI in Firefox (or anywhere else) is how to turn it off so it stays off forever.
@thibaultamartin It is sad. I used to tell people to not move to Vivaldi because it is Chromium and closed source. Mozilla is making it harder for advocates to not get laughed out of conversations.
@thibaultamartin
AFAIK their Ai will be local so it won't track anyone
@thibaultamartin Not sure if that is the majority of them, it's certainly at least a fair chunk of the user base. I'm also not sure if that wouldn't result in crystallizing the user share on a very small part of web users, and therefore preventing Mozilla's mission.
What they are failing to understand and do is to adopt this with the correct tone and possibly correct priority on the UX. The blog doesn't even mention the users who don't want AI as existing, and that's offensive.
Mozilla sprouted Rust and Servo. They can do cool things that make the world a better place, even if it takes more work to extract a marketing argument for an investor brochure.
It's frustrating to see Mozilla dig its own hole of irrelevancy.
@thibaultamartin What kind of Mozilla?
A deep dive on Mozilla reveals “Engineering Mozilla”, the part that makes and engineers stuff; And the “Mozilla Foundation” that have high figure salaries pontificating “All Things Digital” while selling access to commodity user data.
@thibaultamartin I've seen Mozilla's channels swamped with complaints about "AI" every time they've pushed in that direction. They can't possibly be doing this unaware of the opposition to it.
They must be doing this deliberately to force "AI" adoption.
@thibaultamartin Agreed, I am still using FF because it's still the least bad and most maintained browser but this will be what makes me jump ship eventually. Lots of people are less tolerant than me and already have. If at least they had one master switch to disable all that, but no, it's like 7 settings at this point and they tend to reset when it updates...
@skylark13
But it's the only viable #nonproprietory alternative. What will you switch to?
@thibaultamartin
@skylark13
@thibaultamartin
I must correct myself: AFAIK #firefox #renderingEngine is the only major #freeAsInFreedom one not actively controlled by a GAFAM.
@thibaultamartin Forum users are quite vocals on this too
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922
What a waste of time and resources
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