Share your feedback on the AI services experiment in Nightly

[asafko]

Hi folks, 

In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it. 

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Firefox Labs (please see full instructions here). 

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier.

Thanks so much for helping us improve Firefox!

[a7h13f]

I'll be moving away from Firefox because of these changes, but thanks for being open and honest about your company's intent.

I originally switched to Firefox *because* it was less bloated, cleaner, and more privacy focused than the alternatives. I'm sad to see Firefox move away from the original design philosophy.

[RattyTatTat]

You can tell that everyone hates the idea completely by now, right. Continuing would be a slap in the face.

[VildaVedo]

Dude, what the hell. If you don't like this feature, then don't enable it over checkbox...

[omlt]

Respectfully (because you've clearly been given the **bleep**ty end of the stick with handling community response) :

NOBODY ASKED FOR THIS, NOBODY WANTS THIS.

F THE PLAGIARISM MACHINES

[GrislyBoar]

I have several questions:

1. What do you mean by "functionality?" What's the function? How does this make Firefox better?

2. Are you aware that the use of generative algorithms advertised as "AI" (I stress this because it is not true AI) make users find you and your product untrustworthy, and there are studies saying so?

3. The implementation of generative algorithms has been a failure across the board. What makes you think it won't be a failure here, too? Because as it turns out, tools that were designed for specific niche purposes, mostly relating to statistics, aren't particularly useful outside of that setting.

4. Why the insistence on it? Nobody's interested except shareholders. And even their interest is waning due to the lackluster results of these tools.

Being told repeatedly that something is the future of tech and repeating it to others does not magically make it so. These generative tools have been demonstrated over and over again that they can't perform any task that they're advertised as capable of, largely because said tasks were not what they were designed for. There are already simpler, less wasteful tools that do these jobs much better.

It baffles me that executives at *computer software companies* can display such egregious tech illiteracy all for the sake of hoping people will buy into what is essentially digital snake oil. Just because Steve Jobs had one good idea that eventually worked doesn't make everything the industry pushes the same. Yet so many are so infatuated with the idea of Steve Jobs, they're obsessed with emulating him. In my opinion, there are too many Steve Jobses in the tech industry.

What we need are more Steve Wozniaks. Not in the sense that he was a computer engineering genius, but in the fact that he was a genuinely nice, agreeable person. And he was also the one person who told Jobs "no." His insistence on putting eight expansion slots in the Apple II when Jobs didn't want them was what made Apple a success in the beginning. His tech literacy gave him authority that Jobs didn't.

Success in the tech sphere does not begin and end with successful marketing. It happens when the people who know what they're talking about, and know what the consumer truly wants, can tell executives "no" and make marketing stay in their lane.

[Empterdose]

Getting to more seamless integrations would likely be trickier as an extension

You know what's really cool? Mozilla, as the developers of the browser, can enhance the capabilities of extensions to make it possible to integrate things like this seamlessly!

Complaining that the platform you built is inadequate rings pretty hollow, particularly when the community has been telling you that over and over again since the switch to WebExtensions.

[VyriaDurav]

I want none of this. Absolutely none of this. All of it is antithetical to the principles that made me choose this browser over Chrome and it's myriad clones. The fact that not only is this something being proposed, but you have the audacity to talk about expanding it further before even checking to see if people are willing to overlook this horrendous action? Cease. I don't need any of these features and I certainly don't want to burn the world to the ground powering them. I can find my own websites, I don't need an environmental hazard and panopticon doing it for me.

[Sintanity]

An alogrithm that auto-completes a search result or suggests an open tab isn't the same as an LLM like ChatGPT and making this comparison either means you have no idea what you're talking about or is deliberately obtuse. Weird and gross behavior.

[dggozo]

those are bad features even without considering the cost of AI. I can name a tab group myself.

[MageBunkshelf]

---

@Mardak wrote:

This is currently a first integration of AI with plans for more optional functionality that don't require a sidebar interface, e.g., suggesting tabs that are relevant to your current activity or name for a tab group.

---

Jesus christ no

[AntBand]

it sounds awful like wtf

[simonjadis]

If Firefox were to ever "recommend" a tab to me based upon what I'm doing, I would use Firefox to find and download a new browser.

[malogan]

"minimal impact for those who don't want it"

That's cool. Since minimal isn't worth being concerned over, you guys have some big name financial supporters so if I stop my monthly donation to the mozilla foundation that should also be pretty minimal, yeah?

[Lenyberry]

"suggesting tabs that are relevant to your current activity or name for a tab group" sounds like a terrible, annoying feature that I actively do not want to ever be bothered by having to go figure out how to disable!

Let people use their own brains to decide what they want to do and how they want to name things, ffs.

[greenbird]

Honest question: is "what should I call this tab group" a problem you have so often that you need an outside source to help you?

[rarsneezes]

Sorry, I really don't want Firefox - and especially not any AI services - to be paying enough attention to my browsing history/tabs to suggest me new tabs. I don't care if the tabs are relavent or not - What happened to Firefox protecting my browsing data privacy?

[benlk]

If the roadmapped future integrations require access to browser APIs that aren't available to extensions, then Firefox should figure out how to make those extensions available to extensions in a safe way, rather than using this as an excuse to shoehorn unwanted AI API clients into Firefox. Leave the AI API client in an optional extension that users can install.

[verbedr]

Making it possible for all extension to benefit the same seamless integration would benefit everyone.  I would focus on that, instead of trying to integrate "an" AI into your product.

Consider this as a challenge, eat your own dogfood.

[AntBand]

we want NO impact. ZERO.

[milleniumbug]

> suggesting tabs that are relevant to your current activity or name for a tab group

not gonna lie, asking a remote service or a local LLM for this sounds absolutely miserable.

Also this is a self-admission that your extension system is not good enough. But honestly it seems you are trying to manufacture a demand where there is none.

[coepi]

Frankly, I'm not sure I can believe you. There's money to be made in the AI trend despite it being wildly unethical and out of step with Mozilla's supposed values, so you've decided to force it onto all of your users. I suspect you don't want it to be an extension because then we could fully opt out of it (and no, 'just don't use it' is not an acceptable solution for reasons others have explained above).

[duskord]

Can you also provide Claude?

[Mardak]

You can configure a custom provider to Anthropic Claude for easy access to chat while on another tab. Currently the context menu passing in a prompt doesn't work, but we'll work with them for better compatibility.

 

[feoh]

Thanks for the response! Would the custom provider feature allow me to use something like ollama with the ai chat sidebar?

[Mardak]

The latest Nightly 130 (20240712095045) includes Anthropic Claude in the list and supports passing in prompts with the context menu when logged in.

 

[wutongtaiwan]

I want kimi chat.This is chinese chat bot

[TS25714]

This will absolutely need a second sidebar, the same way Edge already has (left side for tabs, right side for copilot etc, for example). Right now we would have to decide between Sidebery and similar (even the upcoming efforts to bring vertical tabs natively to FX) which is not worth it IMHO. Vertical tabs > shortcut to chatbot.

[Mardak]

These Nightly builds have the new sidebar experience with vertical tabs in development along with the chatbot experiment. We're still working on integrating these features, but you can have both active today.

 

[aminought]

Sidebery > native vertical tabs. Also:
1. Each sidebar extension should have their own width. It is very inconvenient to look at the result of the AI Chatbot in a small panel in which I usually have Sidebery.
2. Some sidebar extensions, like AI Chatbot, should be able to open in the overlay so that I can return to Sidebery without additional actions.
3. A setting is needed to select the language in which the chatbot should respond.

Thank you!

[Iron56716]

I honestly like the AI Chatbot integration. I'm hoping Google AI Studio will be added officially.

It'd be even better if the sidebar could get official web page integrations like Edge or Floorp, That feature is very handy.

[Mardak]

Curious, is there a particular functionality you like about Google AI Studio? The additional settings for Gemini model choice? Model tuning? Here's using it as a custom provider, but I had to manually copy/paste the prompt:

 

[Iron56716]

There's quite a lot of things I like about Google AI Studio. Firstly, the ability to completely turn off all the safety filters, it's much easier to chat with the AI without them. Secondly, like you mentioned - the Gemini Model choice. I can change the model to any different one right in the conversation without the need to open a new chat. And of course, there's some extra perks like Custom Instructions, Model tuning, etc. Last but not least, AI Studio allows the use of Gemini 1.5 Pro without the subscription (unlike the regular Gemini websites. Although, the AI Studio version of 1.5 Pro does have a 50 turn rate limit I believe).

[everentropy]

Why are you even using Firefox if you're just giving your information to Google products anyway...

[mcortt]

AI in sidebar is great. However, please give us some sort of keyboard shortcut to open it.

[Mardak]

Does it need to be a keyboard shortcut or would a dedicated button to click be good for now? There's a lot of existing keyboard shortcuts, so having one for each sidebar might be too many, but could a keyboard shortcut to toggle / reopen the last opened sidebar work too?

[mcortt]

The main goal of a web browser is to browse the web, not browse the browser UI, which is what I feel a specific button accomplishes. The button would work (the sidebar toggle button is what I currently use), but there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle it currently that I am aware of. Personally, I would prefer a keyboard shortcut for the AI chat specifically, but I am also of the thought that most things should have keyboard shortcuts, or at least be able to be assigned a keyboard shortcut (a la extension shortcuts). Though, I understand where that could be a lot of work.

My preferences in order:

• Assignable keyboard shortcut to AI, synced tabs, etc
• Keyboard shortcut for sidebar toggle
• Button to open it

For now I would settle and be happy with a keyboard shortcut to toggle the sidebar to its last state.

[ppm1337]

I disagree. As a user, I want to have a consistent UX. In my mental model of using Firefox I want to be able to access all features that I consider useful via a keyboard shortcut. The moment I need to regress from my default behaviour of keyboard navigation, a feature becomes less appealing.

Also, most other sidebars are accessible via keyboard (Ctrl + H for history, Ctrl + B for bookmarks, ...) why suddenly have a sidebar that's deviating from this scheme?

[jtha]

I agree with the others, and frankly I would not use this if it was not a shortcut key away. Even less inclined to use this if I have high resolution / widescreens, this just adds friction. Ideally in general users could set the shortcut keys themselves if they want to, and assign to which keys. I bet you most of the shortcut keys aren't used anyway, so instead of having them all pre-assigned and firefox deciding which gets shortcuts which don't, leave it to the users to decide, if they want to.

[benlk]

Making keyboard shortcuts configurable to the user would solve a lot of concerns here: people can assign what works for them, and if they don't want to unintentionally invoke the AI tool, they can unassign the shortcut. See https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979

[Henrymamar]

The AI in the sidebar is a fantastic feature for quick access to information, but adding a keyboard shortcut would make it even more convenient. A shortcut would allow users to open the sidebar instantly, enhancing productivity and streamlining workflow. Hopefully, this functionality can be added soon for an even smoother user experience!