Mozilla roll out first AI features in Firefox Nightly
Mozilla roll out first AI features in Firefox Nightly
As Mozilla envisions Firefox’s future, we are focused on building a browser that empowers you to choose your own path and gives you the freedom to explor
What purpose is served by having AI built-in to the browser?
Baked in AI makes C Suite and shareholders happy. That's about it.
The implementation doesn't sound terrible.
- It's opt-in
- It's basically a sidebar chat window
So if you already use GPT for day-to-day, it may be a welcome experience. If you don't, don't opt in.
I'm skeptical of GPT add-ons, bit at least this was done in a low-bloat opt-in way (which allows Mozilla to bring in revenue (probably)).
Know what's even more opt in? An official extension. Installed only if someone wants it.
I switched to LibreWolf and Mull a few months ago in preparation for this. I'll come back to Firefox if the investors pull their collective heads from their asses.
"Move all my rf resesrch tabs to a new window"
You can skip search engines sometimes
I can skip the search engine and go right to the bad suggestions, finally!
Looks like the "local AI only" idea was purged in favor of some Big Tech stuff that can give Mozilla some fat cash for promoting their services! Mozilla's second (or third idk at this point lol) downfall is looking really strong with all their recent decisions. WebKit is another independent engine that still doesn't seem to suck in terms of enshittification but it's basically not used anywhere except Apple ecosystem. Chromium is getting a full monopoly yay.
I do self host several AI applications for myself on a low end device and I think for most lowend even mid devices local AI is unfeasible. Nowadays is too much resource heavy and times are too long without high end devices.
For my computer generating a description of a picture (one of the firefox new features) could easily take up to 5-10 minutes with the cpu at 100%. That's just not viable for doing while browsing.
Anyway I would love for firefox to open source the server side of this. So in case someone have s computer powerful enough they could do it locally if they want to.
Still adding proprietary and actually evil AI providers is a questionable decision.
WebKit does exist for Linux, Gnome Web has been quite a nice experience however it still lacks support for most extensions (however some Firefox extensions do work). The real world performance is still a bit lacking but its close to Firefox on paper and as it continues to update I will probably swap to it. For now its a nice way for me to test if my websites will break on macs (spoiler, WebKit still lacks some stuff).
So it isn't even local private AI but rather just an Interface for NOT-private LLMs like ChatGPT (which specifically stated, at least at first, that all your queries to it and their responses are being monitored and saved by OpenAI)
Why are they not using their own llamafile ?