06-21-2024 11:55 AM - last edited on 10-18-2024 02:19 PM by Jon
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!
09-19-2024 08:13 PM
If you want AI in your browser so bad, please switch to one of the browsers that already has AI integration. And may your moment of realization dawn before AI destroys the ability of service-sector humans and creative-endeavor-sector humans to earn even a partial living wage -- not to mention the environmental impacts of the processing power needed to make AI function. I mean, who wouldn't choose the shiny button that destabilizes society? IT'S NEW AND SHINY!
09-19-2024 04:06 PM
NO
09-19-2024 04:45 PM
AI chatbots send the wrong idea of the future of the internet. Diminishing customer service jobs, connection and oversight, with far too many opportunities for corporate interference and biased training data. Bots are frustrating to interact with both in cases of malware and the new "standard" of "web assistants", I've never left a conversation with a bot that satisfied my questions or needs. On top of that, AI technology is powered by environmental disasters, just like bitcoin before it. Not a direction I'd like to see Firefox go in.
09-19-2024 05:09 PM
Please do not add AI to Firefox, it's one of the pillars of a good internet experience and I don't want that to change!
09-19-2024 05:16 PM
Hello Mozilla. The reason I prefer using Mozilla products like Firefox is because you don't usually add this kind of bull**bleep**. Your product appeals to the user who wants to escape from the en**bleep**tification other companies are filling their products with. Mozilla has a really good thing going on with Firefox being a perfectly usable browser that doesn't require giving up most of my privacy and data. Don't ruin it with AI. You know what the people want? I personally want tab workspaces, like the ones Opera has ❤️
09-19-2024 06:21 PM
Unnecessary; AI made Google search more confusing and irrelevant.
09-19-2024 07:06 PM
I use the mozilla vpn service. I prefer forefox to any other browser for it's ease of use and focus on it's customers base over shareholders. If ai is implemented I will be cancelling my vpn with Mozilla and not giving them my money. Do not implement AI.
09-19-2024 07:13 PM
Looking through the replies and not seeing a single customer of Mozilla saying they wouldn't even enjoy it, let alone use it, means that if they go ahead with it anyway, I'll sleep like a baby switching to a different browser and vpn.
09-19-2024 10:45 PM
Dear God no. It's unnecessary, annoying, invasive, and wastes ridiculous amounts of energy. It will actively make me not use your browser.
09-20-2024 02:30 AM
NOBODY is asking for this, how about you all focus on actually improving the browser instead of going down the latest fad?
09-20-2024 07:46 AM
Absolutely not. AI is godawful on so many levels and I will never use it.
09-20-2024 08:08 AM
There are a lot of dumb AIs in this thread. No, I'm not going to go back and look for every AI comment because that would make me stupid too. But they need to be called out. Here, I will pick one AT RANDOM: VildaVedo. VildaVedo's comment is completely wrong, full of lies, and probably made by an AI.
09-20-2024 08:09 AM
There are a lot of obvious AIs in this thread. No, I'm not going to go back and look for every AI comment because that would make me stupid too. But they need to be called out and shamed. Here, I will pick one AT RANDOM: VildaVedo. VildaVedo's comment is completely wrong, full of lies, and probably made by an AI.
09-20-2024 08:57 AM
To any"one" (not real people) who comments in support of this "AI" without any actual helpful use cases or grounded reality (yes, there could be some real use for some actual AI): you EXPLICITLY give me permission to use your words, content, and likeness in my LLM. Don't worry, my LLM model is actually highly energy efficient. It's only a few lines of code! It's not plagiarism... it's AI model training. It's not defamation... the AI model was just hallucinating and will be fixed in the Future(tm) I promise (wink). Sorry, I'm not making the rules... you are!
(this is founded on the principal of the Golden Rule. If you don't like the Golden Rule and are against "AI" then I shall treat you respectfully - however you wish to be treated. Those that don't like the Golden Rule but are in favor of all/most AI: I shall treat them the same - but they obviously wish for me to take all of their content and likeness and take all of their energy, water, food, being outside while "lying" to them. YES IT IS FOR ME TO DECIDE - THEY SAID IT WAS OKAY!)
09-20-2024 09:35 AM
Slava Ukraini!
09-20-2024 02:24 PM
I think most of my feelings have been covered already by other people, but just to reiterate: this is an incredibly stupid and harmful idea. Drop it, or I'm leaving Firefox - and I'm far from alone in saying that.
09-20-2024 05:12 PM - edited 09-20-2024 05:17 PM
Ollama would be great, not completely hostile to this idea but I would like to run the AI locally personally. If I was really nitpicky prefer it to be opt-in and a extension instead, but adding Ollama support so I can use my GPU would be enough
09-21-2024 11:00 AM
Isn't it funny that Mozilla actually hid the "local" option when they pushed this experiment to the default branch? Some things (OpenAI and Google) are more important than others
09-20-2024 06:38 PM
this is unfathomably stupid. firefox has as a whole been built by catering to people who explicitly despise having their data scraped to be shovelled into algorithms, weather its advertisement ones, tracking ones, or both rolled into one and made 17x as enviornmentally harmful that we now call "artifical intellegence". literally **bleep**ing 0 of the userbase of firefox wants this. you have to be so **bleep**ing out of touch to think for even a seccond this would be recieved well. yeah man. **bleep** over ur entire stupid browser to further support a morally unethical, enviornmentally harmful, completely **bleep**ing useless feature. yeah. ok.
09-20-2024 06:55 PM - edited 09-20-2024 06:57 PM
I hope you do not do this, because one of the reasons Firefox is my preferred web browser is that it does not / has fewer of these AI integrations that I find irritating and not useful to me at all.
Given your user demographic, I think this would be a terrible idea. Literally created this account to say no no thank you please
09-20-2024 08:57 PM
Please don't do it, the main reason I use Firefox is because I'm sick of the rampant AI on Google
09-21-2024 02:44 AM
Please don't add AI features to Firefox, there are so many other places to get AI and it's getting harder to find places that aren't affected by AI. Please keep Firefox one of those places.
09-21-2024 07:01 AM
Please no. AI is not a useful feature; it is not helpful for spellchecking, fact-finding, or even auto-completing responses. This is because AI is not actually "intelligent," it's just offering the statistically most likely output. And especially for a model trained on data that is pulled from wherever it can, that isn't properly sourced or curated to apply to specific lines of inquiry, the "statistically most likely" answer to a question is often a link to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
This isn't even touching on the environmental impact of churning through all that data for each response. Or the privacy concerns of how that data is gathered, considering the "update" that offers AI as a choice is almost always followed by a forceful integration that gives the AI features permission to access everything on the user's device. AI is spyware wrapped in a shiny layer of convenience, except even the convenient aspects are unreliable at best.
I have recommended Firefox to people for years, pointing to its focus on user customization, protections, and privacy. Adding AI to Firefox is certainly not the decision I would have expected. I hope it is reversed soon. I would be honestly saddened to give it up. But AI is a feature I emphatically do not want. I have seen too many websites and services begin with "you can opt-out" only to follow with "actually, you can't opt-out anymore" to trust a supposedly voluntary feature will remain so.
09-21-2024 10:11 AM - edited 09-21-2024 10:16 AM
Don’t make it default, and keep it optional. Or better yet, just don’t. You will appeal to users who don’t want AI forced on them. This survey may give you an idea of the size of that market.
09-21-2024 10:22 AM
need a shortcut key to open/close the sidebar, currently none are assigned, a choice to bind it to a key would be extremely handy to keep the sidebar closed when not in use, bit annoying to have to use alt, arrow keys etc to get it to open again when i close it. Needs an automatic hide/grow feature too
09-21-2024 01:08 PM
Please don't do this, Mozilla! I've been faithfully using your Firefox browser since the early 2000s and always recommend it to others as a better alternative. AI is a scourge. It is environmentally irresponsible and destructive and also has serious privacy and plagiarism issues.
09-21-2024 03:43 PM
**bleep** off
09-21-2024 04:29 PM
Love the new AI integration! The prompt, however, doesn't work well with Gemini. For example: https://g.co/gemini/share/ae8317819212
It would be helpful if we could edit the prompt templates (and maybe add our own).
As long as the feature is optional and is off by default, I don't see why it should pose a privacy/security risk. Let AI lovers have their favorite AI easily accessible, and let AI haters be free and safe from AI as they wish.
09-21-2024 04:55 PM
I'm so tired please dont
09-21-2024 04:58 PM
Hey, literally made a profile just to say, please god no.
Y'all have been at the forefront of normalcy when it comes to browsers for half a decade, at least. AI integration is not the way to continue that trend. Just look at Googles forced integration of Gemini, can you honestly tell me of any person that willingly uses it?
In the end it's will be a waste of development time, resources, and good graces to add something no one particularly wants. If someone is in desperate need to have an AI from their browsing experience they can use the other 13 ones that do, Firefox does not need to become the 14th.
09-21-2024 05:07 PM
i don't feel like ai, even if fully optional, would add anything to the browser, and it is of my belief it would simply make it compliant in a meaningless fad that harms the wider world.
09-21-2024 05:07 PM
Absolutely no. Awful idea. Why not start selling nfts next, that'd achieve the same effect of ruining the goodwill you've accumulated so far.
09-21-2024 05:26 PM
Generative AI is nothing short of a drain on computational resources and I can't think of a single argument as to why it should be implemented, so I very much hope it isn't here.
09-21-2024 05:36 PM
One of, if not the main reasons I use Firefox as my browser both on mobile and desktop is because it does not have features like ai integration as I find they obfuscate the search results I am looking for more often than not. You have a simple and effective system that I feel would only be hurt by such inclusions, wether central or optional. And I ask that you please avoid disrupting that selling point.
09-21-2024 05:38 PM
We do not want this. AI integration is a harmful way of spreading misinformation, replaces important man-made programming from the browser and uses up much more energy than the already very energy consuming standard browser. AI integration as an automatic feature is a bad idea
09-21-2024 05:45 PM
I really don't understand why everyone kneejerked so hard against this when it is currently only opt-in, and I would expect it to remain that way by default. The wide selection of model API endpoints is also excellent, as would be the ability to use local LLMs.
I for one would like to have the ability to be able to use loaded tabs as context for certain AI chats, that would be a great integration.
For everyone that would rather instead panic about "the big bad AI", you can keep it off. Nobody is forcing you to use this feature.
09-21-2024 05:49 PM
Please for the love of all that is holy do not waste your time with that hot garbage, AI algorithms have no idea what they're talking about, they just slap letters together in a way some vastly underpaid foreign slave-wage worker marks as "looking like a vaguely appropriately coherent sentence". Any semblance of competence in these programs is sheer luck; they're utterly incapable of anything resembling true thought and will provide no worthwhile service to anyone.
09-21-2024 06:19 PM
Please please please no Ai, it is virtually useless and ethically abhorrent to me. I don't want to stop using Mozilla don't make me, please.
09-21-2024 06:53 PM
If I wanted an AI tool I would literally use any other mess of a browser. I don't want it on Firefox as well.
09-21-2024 07:27 PM
Please don’t. If you do please make it something people can choose to opt in to instead of just rolling it out to everyone at once