The poll is over, and the result is clear:
#FireFox users have very little interest for Chatbot integration into their browser.
I am very much aware that the people, who voted in this poll are hardly a representative sample, but more than 2.4K people is a better size than many “professional” opinion polls.
@mozilla & @firefox should take people, who actually care about their #browser choice, seriously.
I still seriously believe that #Mozilla’s fate matters,
https://berlin.social/@mina/113102817500429735
1/3
as being a prominent and established way of accessing the internet without using a product owned by one of three three tech giants.
No niche browser can play the same role.
To me, hopping onto a running train doesn’t seem to be the way to go when it comes to creating and keeping trust:
People, who think that cars are a terrible way of getting people around in cities, don’t want another Tesla, they want a good bike.
Here we have a problem, common to many non-profits:
2/3
Fake Professionalism!
I don’t believe that CEOs, who demand a 7 digit salary, have the ability to understand the soul and heart of a collective of people (in the case of many #FOSS projects: some of the world’s most skilled and talented programmers), who donate lots of their time and energy for a project they believe in, and hence lack the credibility and skills necessary for making them thrive in the long term.
Firefox’s ever falling market share proves that.
3/3
If I want to use a chatbot, I’ll access a website that provides one.
My browser is supposed to be a program that lets me access the internet, and nothing else.
Or I’ll have one installed as a separate app, which will have access to data on my system.
So either it’s a separate app, or it’s a website. I don’t see a need for my browser to be that app.
What Firefox provides here:
A connector to LLM providers.
Accelerators (context menu options).
From a coding perspective, this should ideally be a very lightweight functionality.
This feature is very analogous to options to add a search engine, and also to provide accelerators via context menu.
While it can be done via third-party or Official Mozilla add-ons, but (to me) it still makes sense to have it part of the product.
Firefox user here: Fuck no I don’t want a chatbot built into my browser.
You are definitely not alone!
Eventhough I am not pro chatbot, such a poll is unfortunately completely worthless. Only random samples (or at least representative ones) allow to say something about a group.
If we go into an AI fanboy forum and ask the same question, we may find 3000 people saying the exact opposite. It just means nothing whatsoever.
Yes and no.
Obviously, the people questioned here, are not representative for the entire FF user community.
However: The Fediverse at large is a community of mostly tech-savvy people, who do care about independence from major corporations.
These are, in fact, also the people who are the core users and developers of FOSS software.
Whilst the exact percentage means nothing, the tendency is so clear that it should, at least, be taken into consideration.
Did you read part 2 & 3?
https://johnmjennings.com/an-important-lesson-from-bullet-holes-in-planes/
The responses needs to be contain representation at least equally to non Firefox people who no longer care to answer a poll about a product that they don’t use. Why? Only current users are going to answer the poll, not the people with the cuts and pain that forced them back to Chrome or safari. Asking survivors how to reinforce survival actually doesn’t solve for why do many people off board Firefox.
Frankly you should ask people like my 60-70yo parents why chrome not Firefox. You’ll learn more from that than the corrected responses of people who loudly have preferences but at the end of the day would stay either way. My parents tried Firefox, but then left it. Although they only tried from insistence from their son.
PS: I agree with the poll. I don’t want a chat bot either. If I did, I’d install a plugin that integrates once of my own choosing. Given the availability, privacy, and ease of lmstudio I’d rather leave it in its own place outside the browser and network. I don’t know how those like my parents feel about a bot that can probably answer their questions. I also doubt they care. Maybe it would help them ask questions they’re too embarrassed to ask friends and family for. Usually how to questions they’ve asked dozens of times. But that’s super dangerous.
100%. I feel like the broad fediverse community is not a fan of generative AI
I think it can be useful for some users but hardly the majority.
You can select text now in Firefox and ask it to make a summary or to explain it in simpler words. Then it generates a query to chatgpt in the sidebar who answers it.
So for some use cases I think it’s nice. Even better if you could make it do research and save us time. Like “check the top tech sites for reviews of this phone model and give me a summary of it’s major flaws”.
Chat gpt can do that but it’s not really integrated into the Firefox experience. If you could select a phone name and have a one click option to “give me top flaws and pros of this model according to top reviewers”, that could save a lot of time.
I think it’s just about packaging this functionality better. I don’t think it should be in a sidebar. It should just be in a new tab with lots of options to continue the research in different ways.
For the use cases you describe actually sound right on the mark? If you’re viewing a page and you want something summarised on there, it would be nice to not have to leave that page, but to stay in its context, for example. If you’re looking at the specs of a particular phone, ditto.
(I don’t expect I’ll use this feature myself, but if I did, it sounds like I’d use it in that way. Luckily, I can just choose not to use it without any downsides.)
That’s not private in the least. If anything add optional support for ollama
They have a choice of different models in the Nightly version of Firefox. So I think we are getting there. Maybe even an option to run our own self hosted models.
Then there are the cases where you want the LLM to actually interact with the page, using the current web page state and your credentials.
For example, one might want to tell it to uncheck all the “opt in” checkboxes in the page… And express this task in plain English language.
Many useful interactive agent tasks could be achieved with this. The chatbot would be merely the first step.
