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!

[Mardak]

When you have a sidebar open whether it's Sideberry or AI Chatbot, there should be a dropdown towards the top to switch which sidebar is open as well as a close X button. You can also customize the toolbar to add a "Show sidebars" button to toggle your last sidebar open and close.

Alternatively, is the chatbot feature still useful for you if you change `browser.ml.chat.sidebar` so that the chatbot opens in a regular tab instead of sidebar? This would be useful for starting chats from the selected text and saved prompts, but not as useful for side-by-side comparisons. You can still also open the chatbot in the sidebar if you want a fresh chat without prompt.

[k2662]

You can't run a local llm on the Ai chatbot UI. Can this feature be added?

[Mardak]

Are you talking about running a LLM directly in Firefox or using local chatbot providers? There's existing configuration that others here have gotten llamafile or ollama working in the sidebar including passing in prompts. Firefox alt-text generation for pdfjs supports running various models including LLMs, so there's a path to doing it within Firefox, but currently it's quite slow. If people do want to try this out on Nightly, we can look into exposing this at least for advanced users with sufficient hardware.

[k2662]

That would be nice, Thank you.

[pod-person]

I just got this feature in Firefox 130 and made an account specifically to post my feedback:

No.

I would like to know specifically who asked for this feature in its current state. There are problems others have stated here about quality issues and environmental issues of generative AI, which are all valid, but in my opinion, the bigger issue here is that you are integrating privacy-intrusive LLMs into a browser that has a good reputation for its strong privacy standards. In layman's terms, by implementing this, you are eroding the ethos of your browser. This is a recipe for disaster and you need to pivot ASAP. The fact that you are even throwing around ideas of integrating AI with people's browsing activity is not good if it's going to be with proprietary models that run in the cloud. You implemented this feature in a time when Microsoft is getting absolutely flamed for their integration of AI into Windows and their poor handling of it from a security and privacy standpoint. What you should have done is taken a step back after news of that broke and thought "How can we implement AI in a way that's not invasive to the privacy of our users and doesn't get in the way for users who don't want it?"

In my opinion, here is what needs to be done in order to right this wrong:

1. Remove functionality that connects to any chatbot not hosted on the user's own computer.
2. Implement a LLM that runs entirely locally on the user's PC. No exceptions.
3. Keep it OFF by default. If people want it, they'll know where to find it.
4. Once it's more tightly integrated into Firefox, give users absolute control over what data is being processed by the locally-run LLM. Keep the amount of data it processes minimal. People will be up in arms if you don't.

If these things are done, the AI people will be happy and the privacy people will be happy.

You need to fix this as soon as possible otherwise Firefox is going to get a metric ton of bad PR. This is a disaster in the making.

[Tsyoka]

If you are on a debian / apt machine, you can add a file to /etc/apt/preferences.d to revert and pin Firefox to version 129. Will either solve the problem or at least give you time to find other alternatives.

[pod-person]

How is that easier than just leaving the feature turned off?

[Tsyoka]

If the feature is present on the system, you need to monitor whether future updates will "magically" enable it against your will.  If the feature is never installed in the first place, that concern becomes a non-issue.

Aside from that, if there is a continuum between easy & convient vs private & secure, many of us will lean much further towards the security end of that spectrum.

I would also be wary of anyone trying to sell easy and convient.  They often don't fully understand the problem domain and are up to some shady marketing.

Refs:

• https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs50/Reading/NoSilverBullet.pdf
• https://mises.org/library/book/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude

[pod-person]

The implication that staying with an older piece of software is more secure is laughable. By staying on 129, you would be missing out on security patches introduced from 130 onward. That much should be obvious, and yet you tout this as being more "secure".

Realistically, there are two ways you could be doing this if you wanted to do it right:

1. Use a fork that has this feature removed
2. Switch to an ESR release that comes from before 130

It's hypocritical to say that you want more security whilst deliberately running outdated software. Consider one of the above options and stop giving people advice that makes their systems worse.

[Julia05]

Please don't add A.I. to the search engine. I specifically started using firefox to get away from the A.I. searches. If you start using A.I, I'm moving search engines again.

[S_Akash]

I think it would be helpful to have a short description of each Chatbot, how they compare with each other, which of them Mozilla believes meets ethical standards (both for end user and everyone in general) and only include those by default which do.

Also a disclaimer about AI Chatbots in general would be helpful (or at least about the current generation). How they can help, some example use cases, what issues they have, what harms they might cause on a personal and societal level, and leave it to the user to then proceed to use the bot if they want.

I understand the need for Firefox to stay relevant (even if it has to do what other browsers shamelessly do even with large market shares), but providing additional information for the people who would read it is always a good thing in my personal opinion. 🙂

[gively]

please add ai chat button on toolbar items.

[barinov274]

Cool! I would like you to also add the ability to use local llms, for more privacy, such as the ability to select llamafile, or to refer to the ollama api. I would also like to have the ability to work with images on the page, using the "screenshot" function in the browser, or selecting from a file.

And in general, more AI - better. You could make the ability to recognize text on the picture, speech recognition, auto translation, creation of subtitles, etc. The main thing is to be able to run it all locally on your pc, and that the models are not loaded into the memory, until the user does not wish.

[mobilex1122]

Good and bad idea. I would like it if there was option for Ollama selfhosted ai. (Or any other selfhosted options)

[mawn]

can we edit the prompts after selecting the text? like instead of summay" => "translate"

[QQueso]

strongly, strongly, STRONGLY against AI and chatbot inclusion to Firefox. They're inaccurate, their energy requirements are bad for the environment, and frankly they're just useless outside of a research setting.

[fournm]

Incredibly strong disapprove, to the point of setting up a Connect account.

[shatteredsword]

honestly mozilla is lucky that firefox doesn't really have any competition when it comes to privacy-based browsers. This would have been the end of it otherwise, and I'm not sure that they realize it.

[haingdc]

Thanks. But don't waste time for these comment like this

[Tatra]

Thanks. But don't waste time for these comment like this.

[Noaiplease]

I do not want generative AI included in Firefox in any way. Not only do I find generative AI to be morally questionable at best, it is a feature that is often incorrect and actively worsens the user experience. If it is added in full I will be considering switching search engines.

[askabaz]

Can you also provide DuckDuckGo AI Chat (https://duck.ai/ or https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Duck+Assist&ia=chat)? I tried to implement it by modifying the string "browser.ml.chat.provider" but it doesn't work.

Edit: I tried to set "browser.ml.chat.provider" to "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=&ia=chat&bang=true": It works but it is very easy to get the error "Search query entered was too long. Please shorten and try again.".

[geekley]

DDG AI Chat weirdly doesn't work if the search query ("q=" part in the URL) is empty. On a quick test, it seems to work for me setting it to https://duck.ai or https://duckduckgo.com/aichat.
The layout is slightly broken (weird horizontal scrollbar) but that seems to be DDG's fault, not Firefox.

EDIT: I see what you mean now. If I ask it to summarize info for example, I get that error message too. I don't know if there's a way to make it work by editing the config strings... 🤔

[1AndDone]

My only feedback about AI is that I want it kept off my computer. I think that it is important to verify the exact sources and dates of information that I find in my searches. AI does not do that, so it is useless to me. If Mozilla fully rolls out AI in the future, I hope that it continues the option in Firefox settings to let users keep it turned off.

[geekley]

Please add DuckDuckGo AI Chat as well (https://duck.ai/ or https://duckduckgo.com/aichat/).
It's an option that claims to respect privacy. It also has multiple providers to choose from, currently GPT4o mini, Claude, Llama, Mixtral (these last 2 seem to be open source).

[geekley]

1. Please let us set a custom provider in a way that we can switch options without losing the URL. Currently, if I select another option, the custom URL I set is lost. Even better, let us add multiple custom providers in the UI, assigning both name and URL for each entry, so it shows that name instead of "Custom provider (URL)".
2. Why can't I right click stuff in the sidebar, like e.g. selected text to copy it, search, etc?
3. You could have a "pop-out" button in the sidebar that moves it to a regular tab (without reloading the page) in case someone wants to continue the chat with more space.
4. In addition to the sidebar close button, you could have a hide button that closes it without unloading the page. So you can continue with the chat history where you left it upon showing the panel again.
5. It would be nice to have a setting to hide the switch provider dropdown. Or you could collapse it into an image button in the area above it, next to the close button, to avoid wasting vertical space.

[Aewin]

Mozilla has talked a big game about 'ethical AI' but the AIs listed include the biggest offenders in terms of negative environmental impact and content theft, so this move makes me question their dedication to ethical AI (as well as their ethical stances in general).

I'd like to ask Firefox to either remove the AI features entirely or provide an alternative download with them completely missing from the browser code. I have myriad ethical and legal concerns about AI and the writing that I share online, and I will need to postpone the update and find another browser to switch to if I can't be assured that nothing is scraping my text. I can only be assured of that if no AI features are integrated into the browser at all.

[pascalin]

I tried it with ChatGPT, but I find the interface a bit obtrusive. I don't want that everytime I highlight some text Firefox displays an annoying icon next to my highlight. I think that behavior should be restricted to when I have the Chatbot sidebar activated.

[Doug7070]

I am opposed in the strongest possible terms to any sort of contemporary generative AI products or features being integrated into Firefox by default. This includes LLMs, diffusion models, or any derivatives based on the same methods or provided in whole or in part by any companies in the current market space for such products.

The ethical ramifications of the current glut of AI products are dire and reach fundamentally to the core of the technology as currently implemented, and I am extremely disappointed that Mozilla would even consider choosing to integrate any form of these products by default. I have ceased the use of multiple pieces of software entirely due to the pointless integration of AI chatbots and other similar "features", and I would very much prefer that Firefox not join that list by chasing the current market trend of dubiously useful AI bloat and its innumerable ethical transgressions at every stage of development and deployment.

To be absolutely clear: I do not care if an LLM is provided by a company or group that claims to respect privacy or an open-source ethos, I do not care if the LLM runs entirely locally and transmits no data to any external server, I do not care what excuses are made by the people peddling these products about their ethical "guardrails", this entire field of software is as it stands currently a poisoned well, and I will not condone or tolerate its use in the software I use on my systems or recommend to others.

If Mozilla does insist on making these integrations available, they should be as optional addons to be installed by users seeking that functionality, not packaged with Firefox by default.

[atiredinsect]

pls stop ai is a scam that does nothing but steal pls let it fail instead of making it worse : (

[hadley]

Yay, more AI slop.

about:config, set browser.ml.chat.enabled to false for anyone else who doesn't want the "plagiaraism as a service" engine embedded into their browser.

[McBoat]

It's great - on desktop I wish it would immediately set focus to the chatbot prompt whenever I open the sidebar. Keyboard shortcuts are also appreciated.

[madcaker]

Kindly keep this garbage out of my browser please. I think you're forgetting who your primary user-base is. Hint: it's not the AI techbros

[llliiimmmeee]

There is a reason it is opt-in, I swear to goodness... how hard is it to understand!

[MageBunkshelf]

Opt-in would be if this were an extension. I do not opt-in to having an AI "feature" being added to my browser.

[umno]

I literally made a connect account after I got Update 130. I simply do not want any generative AI in my supposedly "privacy-focused" browser at all, actually. Not even if it is just a built-in way to access chatbots. You keep saying "your data won't be saved by Mozilla" but what about all the data the LLMs have scraped? Doesn't that count?

[dotnsau]

Adding AI chatbots to browsers is a great idea, but you should do it the way Brave browser did. It's probably the only browser that did it sensibly, by displaying an option like "Ask Leo" while typing in the search bar. Similarly, here there should be an option to choose a default chatbot in the settings, and then when typing in the search bar, we should see options like "Ask ChatGPT", "Ask Google Gemini", etc., depending on the chatbot we chose as the default. Of course, I believe that eventually, such an option should be built-in by default, and then we can disable it in the settings, not the other way around

[llliiimmmeee]

Mozilla has made it very clear that they are going to stick to opt-in for the foreseeable future, and I respect that decision. AI should always be optional.

[shelley]

So I guess it will just put the chatbots page side by side in the page that I am currently in? lol

I can probably tweak the source code and change it to any website and it will do the job. 😂

[llliiimmmeee]

The best part of this feature is the highlight menu, because of the auto-prompts and such.
And yes, you can do that, but you could also just make an extension to use it, which is publicly available, much easier to write, and much easier to distribute. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Sidebars