trustworthy AI
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral
What
At least this is opt-in, and Firefox still allows for manifest v3 extensions, and, on the whole, isn’t using a engine funded by a billion dollar company that’s doing everything in it’s power to spy on you.
Their whole company is funded by a billion dollar company that’s doing everything in its power to spy on you.
Did you read the article? Why would adding an option to use ai in a side bar require shuttering a company?
“this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment”
And
“those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar”
If you are so keen to know, then you will just have to wait a few more years. Firefoxes development is rapidly derailing into nonsense recently. They will have to either kick out their current leadership or they will be reduced to a data sucking, adware company sooner or later.
Who do we turn to for a browser? Not chromium based I don’t trust google codebase.
Yeah idk either sadly. But i know that having only two relevant browsers on the market is like the US party system. Destined to fail.
Nothing lasts forever just like Steam or anything else will one day turn to shit. But pretending like everything is fine will just lead to lots of “we shouldve seen it coming”.
Orion for macOS is pretty awesome.
I actually love Safari but on my work computer I’m forced to use their VPN and can’t run my ad blocking DNS stuff on it, so I use Orion with uBlock Origin on it. It’s basically Safari (built on WebKit) with support for Chrome and Firefox plug-ins (which can be selectively disabled).
people please actually read the article not the headline; this is literally about accessibility improvements for blind and visually impaired people for generating alt text inside of documents and pdfs.
That’s one of the things, but it’s also adding a dedicated sidebar for AI. That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension, there’s absolutely no reason at all why that needs to be something built into the browser.
Developers should be providing alt text themselves, but in cases where they aren’t having a local image recognition model running to provide a description isn’t terrible as long as it’s either 100% local or completely opt-in.
The dedicated sidebar on the other hand feels very much like a cheap attempt to cash in on the AI fad.
That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension
It most likely is on the technical level, just shipped by default and integrated into standard settings instead of the add-on ones. And it’s going to be opt-in, so you won’t have to go into about:config to disable it. Speaking of: You’re looking for extensions.pocket.enabled, it should be false. And before you say “muh diskspace” it’s probably like 5k of js and css or such.
Many of the people complaining about a feature they would just disable and never use are also the same kinds of people who would complain about basic accessibility features and call them “unnecessary bloat”.
Blind people shouldn’t need to give up their privacy to Microsoft and Google to have a web page read to them.
“Trustworthy AI” + Recent aquisiton of an advertising analytics company + a call for people to inform on third party sources of Firefox = Down the enshitification rabbit hole we go.
Any recommendations of a good alternative on android? I’m thinking I’ll move to librewolf on desktop but they don’t appear to have an android version.
I use a fork from F-Droid called Fennec. I’m not sure off the top of my head how closely it tracks with upstream feature-wise but I know it strips out all of Mozilla’s tracking components and it’s always updated within a couple days of the upstream release.
I do like Mull, but I’m also uninformed and I don’t use my mobile browser all too much.
Why does my open source browser need proprietary SaaS products stuffed into it?
Isn’t this what extensions are for?
It also has google stuffed into it, and apparently the new consensus is that you need AI just as much for browsing as a search engine
I wish they spent their time fixing bugs, rather than implementing this bullshit
Can I ask areal question? I’m not trying to be a dick or smart ass, I legit don’t get this. What is bullshit here? I read the article and it seems like a useful feature to me.
“this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment”
“those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar”
Is this opt in only feature really terrible? Because as a user of ai, not switching tabs sounds like a nice new feature to me.
I strongly believe that generative AI is catastrophically misused in the vast majority of its applications, so in my eyes, adding gpt-based AI to the browser is largely a wasted effort
I highly doubt they have one team that switches between experiments and bug fixes, never doing two things at once. Not to mention that something ultimately being ripped out isn’t necessarily wasted effort. They could likely easily pivot virtually anything they put into this specific experiment into any number of other uses.
Why not both? A large project like this needs to fix bugs and also continue to refine its features for long term relevance.
You will never achieve long-term relevance, by chasing immediately available buzzwords
How long does AI need to be used, and how much demand needs to be sustained, for it to stop being called a “buzzword”? I’m a little dubious that NVIDIA became literally the most highly-valued company on Earth off the back of a mere “buzzword.”
