What happened to just making a damn good browser
Money
Mozilla is in the sweet spot of basically being the only available browser that isnt chrome, that has adblocking.
and they are doing everything in their power to fuck it up by chasing this bullshit AI trend thats already dying on the vine.
On one side, its great that forks exist that strip out a lot of the bullshit. On the other hand if main Firefox dies or goes too far into the deep end, there’s no way those forks can take its role
They should stop doing that, instead
I don’t trust any feature that uses the word “AI.”
Ideally, such things should be transparent to the user. As in features that are useful without having to understand the underlying programming mechanisms.
Take FF’s local translation. That’s an immensely useful feature. No one cares that it uses a language model or about any of the details, because it just works well enough, and is useful enough to stand on its own as an advantage over Chromium.
…If they have to brand a feature to make it appealing, that’s a bad sign. Otherwise why TF would I want expensive tab sorting or things like that?
Ok.
But why?Mozilla execs got an angry phone call from their sugar daddies at Google demanding they drive off the last remaining FF users (allegedly)
Even if LLMs were environmentally and socially sustainable they would still be a massive IP theft meant to make the rich even richer. Mozilla and Mistral can go eat a bag of dicks.
I don’t believe in IP, so that really doesn’t bother me much. The problem is when information gets harvested from the public and suddenly becomes someone else’s IP.
So not really theft, more like gatekeeping, but as it stands, its the same result: rich get richer, we can agree on that.
I think that IP may be a good idea on paper, but as it stands it only benefits the powerful, as in “if I pirate content I risk having my life ruined, companies fed their LLMs with everything but the kitchen sink and nothing happened”
The obsession with multilingual is ruining internet.
If you look at Reddit now you have posts which are written in several different languages because everyone relies on backend automatic translation or browser automatic translation. But those content become hard read by anyone not using these technologies. Harder to properly archive in a readable manner, and dependent on expensive tech as AI translation.
This multilingual, everything is in your language, internet is one of the worse things that has happen to the net. I’m tired of having to change my settings all the time to be able to see what the original person wrote, or spoke in the case of automatically translated videos".
On a paranoid note, this might be a plan so people stop learning english so we won’t be able to communicate with each other without their translation technologies.
Totally!
We all should be white, blond with blue eyes and speak German, am I reich?
Nicht Deutsch, sondern Englisch (oder nicht einmal Englisch, sondern nur die Sprache, in der die Website geschrieben ist, ohne viele Sprachen zu mischen). Zudem spielt die ethnische Herkunft der Menschen für die gesprochene Sprache kaum eine Rolle. Die meisten Englischsprechenden stammen nicht aus dem Land, in dem das Englische ursprünglich entstanden ist. Würde jeder von uns seine eigene Sprache verwenden (meine ist übrigens gar nicht Englisch), müssten Foren ständig Echtzeitübersetzungen einsetzen. Das würde all die zuvor genannten Probleme verursachen und uns für die Kommunikation von solchen Übersetzungstools abhängig machen. Ich weiß, es gibt Leute, die nicht wollen, dass Menschen über einen kleinen, leicht kontrollierbaren Kreis hinaus miteinander kommunizieren können. Aber ich gehöre nicht dazu. Ich betrachte Kommunikation als etwas Positives; deshalb halte ich eine Lingua franca für sinnvoll. Es könnte auch Esperanto sein, aber für mich ist Englisch völlig in Ordnung. Als Gegenbeispiel habe ich diesen Kommentar automatisch ins Deutsche übersetzt, um leichter verständlich zu machen, worum es mir geht.
As you say: “use the same language if the website”.
Therefore, people going there regularly aren’t using the translator. If you aren’t a regular, but the information you are looking for might be there, you use a translator.
There is no “obsession for multilingual internet” here, nor should it ruins the Internet".
What I meant for “multilingual internet” is what companies like Reddit or Google are doing. Forcing automatic translates to the user language automatically.
For Reddit this means that, as people write there in whatever language instead of the language of the subreddit, when you use the site outside of the official frontend you see a mix of languages. This means that you search for things in one language and get results written in another language, and you might have been looking for something in a specific language, but as automatic translated websites take over they take away your ability to choose in what language do you want to search things. On youtube for instance I cannot longer know in what language the video is going to be spoken. I might look for videos in one language and get mislead by the automatically translated title, and click into the video and get a shitty AI voiceover instead of the original voice of the video.
For instance I used to search things in Spanish to get “local” websites. Now I search in spanish and I see a bunch of Reddit post about the USA, because reddit forces the translated results into googles feed, and google accepts it. Searching something in a specific language is becoming harder and harder because more and more websites are going multilingual, taking in and serving out any and all languages and doing a bunch of automatic translations in the middle.
Maybe your perception is different. But for me this forced multilingual internet (and what I mean to this is that the frontends automatically translate the content in the business layer) makes for a poor experience with far less freedom and power over the content I choose to see, compared to what I had before.
And also the appreciation, that this might lead to more people not seeing the need of learning a second international language. Which, for me, is one of the most important skills in life, as it gives you the ability to communicate with so many people without being dependant on intermediates.
Oh I totally agree we should see the site in its original language, and that we should have the choice to translate it or not.
Now, what companies accept in their index and what the site owner is doing with automatic translation or not are unrelated.
I gotta admit, I don’t really mind AI as long as it doesn’t exist anywhere in any amount
I don’t really mind AI as long as it lives in a https://ai.megacorp.bs/, and I have to go there to use it, and it stays there.
How do you disable it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
Settings -> AI Controls
path a: toggle “block AI enhancements” which turns them all off and blocks future ones by default. You can scroll down and enable specific ones if you like even with block on
Path b: scroll down and disable the specific ones you don’t want
tbh i would not mind it that much if its local LLM or if its opt-in (opt out as bare minimum)
i also wonder if they are gonna use this for the built-in translator (if you think about it technically most translator software are AI,DEEPL uses a hybrid between LLMS and NMT IIRC. )They have the option to use a local llm but default to online inference. Local is not good enough for most people and people would be really unhappy having their browser use 10gb of ram and spin their fans every query.
Minstrel is working on specialist small models. Maybe one day they are small enough to run in the background no worries.
i see, thanks for the information.
Honestly im not sold yet on the AI in the browser meme but I see a lot of normies at my office say the cant live without google chromes AI integration. Maybe I just hate AI summaries.
My dream is AI navigating websites I hate like facebook marketplace and finding me deals i might like.
no thanks you can keep the slop machine.
Anything not to use Chinese model huh. Aren’t Mistral’s models woefully outmatched by literally everyone else in the AI field, by every metrics?
dick, hammer, … etc
Sometimes when I can’t find an answer online I’ll ask the DDG AI assistant. It’s disabled on my PC so I have to ask on a mobile device.
It still gives me answers that don’t make sense. It’s still an LLM, Siri with a tad more oomf.
Honestly I have soured on DDG.
Not specifically over search assist (even though it’s some useless OpenAI model), but its search is just… bad. I never seem to find what I want, yet it just pops up on some other engine.
Its big useful feature is the diffusion-generated image filtering, but even that is spotty at best. I wish they would lean on the spam/SEO suppression angle more.
Huh! I’ll have to try out other search engines and see what works better.
Oh yeah, great, sounds awesome. Can I get in line now to not use it?
about:config
browser.ml.enable => false
