Mozilla: AI is Going Deeper in Firefox, But Trust me Bro we Are Not Going to Data Mine You or Sell Your Data.
Mozilla: AI is Going Deeper in Firefox, But Trust me Bro we Are Not Going to Data Mine You or Sell Your Data.
Firefox is expanding its AI-powered features, all designed to keep your data private. We believe technology should serve you, not monitor you. Our team und
all these AI features seem like the most useless waste of GPU I have ever seen implemented! Why the hell do I need recommendations for the names of my tab groups? I freaking love that the tech industries' idea of progress in the 2020's is wasting resources on nothing.
Yeah, translation is the only thing here I have any desire at all to use
There are other practical things to use a browser-based AI for, like accessibility improvements for sites that didn’t provide proper alt text or other accessibility features.
But I think an important one few people are talking about is an AI “babysitter” for my grandma so she doesn’t fall for phishing scams. Ad blocking does a lot to protect people there but some smarter detection would be good for a significant chunk of society. Not that this exists yet.
TBF, I love my tab groups, and honestly having to come up with and type out a name for each of them is the biggest hurdle. It's a small thing, but I can imagine myself using tab groups even more because of it.
I, on the other hand, don't keep many tabs open normally, and the groups I use are of temporary convenience if I'm doing a lot of things at the same time.
I can easily spend a few seconds typing the group name in because I already know what the group is used for. I already have a name in mind, I don't need the AI to slowly second-guess me.
...and if you don't know what the group is used for, maybe allowing groups to remain initially unnamed would be a good design choice?
I can see people not necessarily wanting suggestions for tab group names, but... The rest of the list is translations and alt text suggestions for images added to PDFs. The most uncontroversial AI features if ever there were any.
I really don't care for this urge to advertise "AI" everywhere. I also don't care much for the knee-jerk reaction just because someone calls something AI.
Firefox doesn't let you use alt text anywhere, except for the most ridiculously niche location.
People who want to see it when they browse webpages get nothing.
It's only if you
- open a PDF in Firefox
- and then choose to edit it
- and then choose to add an image
- and then choose to add alt text to it
- and then choose to generate alt text instead
If Mozilla cares about accessibility, what a weird niche of a niche of a place to put it.
I'm afraid the reason for that is that is that it's the only place where Firefox has full control over the upload experience. Like, how would Firefox even be able to insert an alt text when e.g. I'm uploading a pic to Mastodon, without adding special cases for every website (which would break whenever the websites update)?
Though I wouldn't be surprised if at least some "copy suggested alt text to clipboard" feature would be added at some point.
In any case, sure it's an edge case, but it's still weird to be angry about "AI" for it. It won't even download the model if you don't use it, AFAIK.
As long as I can disable it, I don't care.
I don't trust AI to catch all the things that interest me on the pages I visit, and I don't want to waste energy on something I won't use.
It should be disabled by default, to avoid the huge energy costs associated with running LLM's.
It's good to watch Mozilla pouring their time, effort, and dwindling funds into the most important features - AI ones!
So, which browser now? Please advise.
LibreWolf: every time it's forced to pick between privacy and convenience it picks privacy. If you like that, it's the browser for you.
Waterfox: if you just want Firefox with zero ability to send any data to Mozilla, without necessarily "hardening" anti-fingerprinting features, this is that. It's a downstream fork that removes all telemetry and non-local features (it removed Pocket before Mozilla did).
Firefox protects your privacy by running AI models directly on your device, ensuring your sensitive data remains local
Good enough for me. The privacy problem with AI is when they are web services you send all your data to for processing. If that isn't happening, that problem is fully solved.
So they don't intend on making a profit from it from data gathering, nobody asked for it, and the open source community who would otherwise donate or contributes to Mozilla are so disgusted by the whole thing tgat they are now just holding their noses and waiting for an alternative.
All of this while Google is stepping down as sugar daddy and they need all the help they can get.
Why the hell are they doing this? Is it just a case of moronic leadership and getting stuck in a negative spiral where the whole operation gets stupider and stupider with each new hire?
Well, people were at least asking for translations all the time.
Yeah, I'm honestly happy about local translations, and I was still supporting Mozilla when it was rolled out. There's just been too much bullshit since.
Its run locally on the device. Did you even read it?
Run locally doesn't mean it isn't sending telemetry data about the inputs and outputs.
AI also doesn't mean that it has to send data to a backend. Your basis for accusing Mozilla of doing something questionable is that they put technologies to use which happen to also be used by data-harvesting companies. This is like saying they're evil, because they use programming languages or databases. It entirely depends on how these technologies are used.
Trust me bro.
Oops. Back to Pale Moon or SeaMonkey for me.
That AI will do that.
"The fact that we removed the promise not to sell your data from our website is pure coincidence."