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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Firefox
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People hate the term AI and so Mozilla were always going to struggle with providing modern functionality, as let's face it, the Internet is embracing AI whether we like it or not
This is poignant. AI as we know it is basically what we were calling machine learning a couple years ago. The same people that are very vocally complaining about the advent of a smarter browser, are the same people that bemoan Mozilla for depending on Google for financing. Somehow they want a browser that only the most devout privacy evangelists would use and they want a browser that is self-sustained through diverse deals, none of which they're able to see or feel.
I feel like there's a lot of disingenuous Firefox supporters who want a utopia browser and refuse to allow Mozilla to do anything to evolve the browser. These same people talk up all the Firefox forks and that change a few defaults and yet bemoan everything Mozilla does that makes those forks possible. It's boring.
Don't forget, they want all of that in a nice, neat, FOSS package, which they will not contribute one dollar or a single line of code to.
@sabreW4K3 why don't you fork Firefox to do all those unnecessary for everyone else things? Firefox needs to stay unbloated, unAI'd, and most importantly sincere to it's original intents.
"I want a browser that can fact-check pages" 🤣 AI cannot fact check itself let alone anything else. Why don't you do your own fact checking?
My £0.02
[citation needed]
Why don't I render my own CSS? Firefox has the ability to pull alternative sources in the background and compare against my current page. What is wrong with that?
It's... Challenging. Like the pet eating thing, there are many sources saying it's true and many saying it's false. Official sources can lie (Russia came to mind for no reason whatsoever), so we rely on sources we already trust, which is tricky and even subjective.
I imagine that "if in Fox then False" is a good start, but aside from that I can only think it getting extra sources, also a challenge without real time web crawling of the internet, were google and Microsoft are already light years ahead.
But if Mozilla can, for example create a sources list and even charge for the ability to be a default on said sources list, wouldn't that be a double win? The problem with things being unreliable can be dealt with via language. Like big red text saying don't trust this blindly.
They can also do intelligent searching and simply surface links.
Do I trust LLM summaries? Not fully. But how about the strategy used by an app like BeyondPDF for Mac:
Think: Firefox does the search, then gives you the sources and the most likely relevant excerpts from each. Consequences of it searching wrong? A small waste of time, but no misinfo.
Sidebar!
One can be against environmental costs of great machine-learning powered search, and offended by the arguable IP theft that created the tools, but it’s unlikely all those who say they “don’t want AI anything!” really mean that entirely.
“I don’t want or need the current version of ChatGPT for my use cases” is very fair though. Maybe they don’t have any SQL queries or Excel formulas - on the edge of their abilities - to build, or text to beautify, or quirky esoteric philosophy to bounce off a robot…
Pay to be the "truth" on a fact checking tool? Fox news is very interested.
Aren't Google and Bing and others paying to be featured in Firefox. What's the difference?
And if not, the feature gets removed again in a year or so. So far it doesn't really seem like it's in your face or anything, so 🤷
Plus you can just turn it off or not use it. This is just a convenience of access to existing things, nothing newly built or added or so. All the loud whiners in that connect thread just once again show to Mozilla that they are better off never asking for feedback, since people are utterly unable to provide any in a way that is well-adjusted or more adult than a 6y old. >.>
Looking at the current status, it's a matter of "not turning it on" rather than "turning it off", even.
But the problem is, people think that there's one single development team working on Firefox and if they're working on AI, they're not improving or working on anything else.
As a data scientist, trust me: you don't want us developing ANYTHING else. You guys dogged a bullet having us busy.
Come on Mozilla, make it happen! As an added bonus, all that added UI cruft will probably mean new places to show advertising at the users.