I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't afford to become a browser for retro-techo-luddites or something.
They really need to work on making an easier transition from Chrome if they care about converting users. Add an out of the box (preferably default) option to make the tabs look normal and not ugly like they are now. Change the private window shortcut to Cmd(Ctrl)+Shift+N like every browser has standardized on. Also I swear they override the normal text input behaviour, specifically if I'm using option+left/right arrows to jump between tokens in the URL bar, it jumps my cursor to unexpected places, like at the wrong side of periods.
Tangentially related but I also find their devtools very lacking compared to Chrome's. They should straight up rip off everything Chrome does in that department.
Are you using the Ubuntu Snap to train Firefox? If so, you can switch to the native Debian packages released directly by Mozilla. They don't do that sandboxing stuff, and they are a lot faster. I don't notice any speed difference between Chromium und Firefox even on a Raspberry Pi.
doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”?
what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.
If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know enough to put any weight behind that statement.
It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly.
I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.
Firefox renders HTML just fine: this is a made up complaint by people who don't actually use Firefox regularly.
And Firefox will never reach feature parity with chrome, because Google keeps adding features nobody asked for constantly. That's all they do - constant churn, new APIs, new bullshit. It's not a coincidence, this is how chrome remains on top and how Google forced even Microsoft to exit the browser game.
that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.
Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias, you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to piss off if their poll result is a unanimous "no".
So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.
Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
If you ask for feedback, and then you receive feedback, that is literally polled data: polling is the act of soliciting and then recording opinion-based data.
(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)
Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is.
If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.
yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and clicking around.
I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and in the next paragraph mention 52 responses to the announcement at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from anyone. Very different thing.
It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52 definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said no.
I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on the Mozilla Connect forum.
The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.
> "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm
Not really, outside influencers looking to capture the next hot thing (like Mozilla) and tech-bros, there is no living soul on this planet that wants or is trying to normalise AI browsers.
That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator.
Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.
Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest.
>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries
I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.
Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
If you tell this to someone who has never used LLMs/AI they may be curious. I have though. I also understand how the technology works and that you will have to read those research papers yourself anyway, verify every source, check every fact (including the ones that got omitted). Maybe it’s better than previous gen machine translation, but you better not rely on context and subtle sentiments being translated as intended all the time.
If it’s important, it’s still better to do it yourself (or pay for the service of another human).
They are miles better than the ordinary machine translators. That's all that matters, because I can't afford a personal human translator to browse the web.
Human translation is obviously better, but not by much, especially on the web. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human.
That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work with a worse version, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
I myself can see using that some day. I was dismissive of AI-assisted search results, now I'm back to using google search most of the time over duckduckgo, because of quality. I don't want to be forced to abandon firefox down the road. Every feature they add,from pocket,vpns, to this, is optional. Just don't use it. Let firefox get more marketshare. It's the only Google alternative.
>It also echoes sentiments expressed in any other medium or social you check.
That tells more about your socials than anything else. I personally know plenty of non-technical folks using ChatGPT (because it's the only buzzword they know) to augment their browsing in an awkward manner. They want utility, they don't give a damn about anyone's sentiments.
I'm not a techbro and I want this. I know other people who aren't techbros who want it as well. So what makes your anecdotal evidence any stronger than mine? Maybe you and the author shouldn't be speaking for everyone.
