That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project.

Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.

For one, because it breaks the Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing that well".

In that vein, I do want Firefox to develop/allow/improve an interface so that machines, amongst which AI-MCPs, can drive my firefox. And do so safely, secure, contained, etc.

So that my AI agent can e.g. open a Firefox tab and do things there on my behalf. Without me being afraid it nukes all my bookmarks, and with me having confidence in safety nets so that some other tool or agent cannot just take over my gmail tab and start spamming under my account.

Point is: I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up. But yet another client to interact with chatbots is not that. Leave that to people building clients please: do one thing and do it well.

Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.

They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.

Signed, a 20 year user.

I don't want this, but at the same time I think people are overreacting. If Mozilla remains true to their word and this is an opt-in sort of thing, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. I can just ignore it.

* I summarize articles.

* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.

* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.

* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.

* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.

Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.

Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.

The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.

As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.

And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.

If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)

But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.

It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.

Why would they want AI?

In particular I'd also love agentic AI so I can quickly automate tasks on shitty web sites that can't be reasonably automated otherwise.

But even a free, no-signup "summarize this wall of text" would be useful.

I think the adoption of AI browsers shows that there are people who find value in this, and I think a lot more people would be interested if it wasn't getting relentlessly forced on them at every corner, making them refuse it out of principle.

I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around.

Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.

- It runs locally without consuming too much energy or phoning home,

- it can be completely disabled without being re-enabled after an update,

- its training set is ethically sourced and the manifest of training sources is publicly accessible (I'm fine with the training data not being accessible as long as it's properly marked in the manifest),

- and the weights and training code are open,

I would be fine having some sort of AI model available as assistant in FF. I probably wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't have any problems with it being there.

E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?

I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.

If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.

What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.

I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.

Tweeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525

As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M

Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.

So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.

I think this is more a case of there being limited appetite for what Mozilla is doing here. At least so far. I keep that stuff turned off in Mozilla and just don't see the appeal. And I'm saying that as someone who does agentic coding for some things, uses and pays for ChatGPT, uses perplexity regularly, etc. And I did install Atlas the other day. I didn't switch to it and wasn't too impressed with what it does.

I think browser makers (including the big ones) are still a bit struggling to identify use cases beyond doing search via a llm, adding side bars, and trying to find a balance between site security and giving all this full access to what's on the page.

Mozilla using their own limited models seems to have very little to add to this mix. At least my impression. But it's too early to state that user's don't want this.

Some users don't want this, clearly. And some other users really don't like any form of change. But there are other users that might want some of these things if they are well executed.

Anyway, Mozilla's attempts here strike me as yet another weak effort to do "something" that follows in a long line of half assed products and services they've developed, launched (sometimes), and killed over the last decades. I don't think they have what it takes; or at least, they have a lot to prove. And the vague hand wavy announcements for this aren't a great sign that they have this figured out beyond "doing something with AI".

As a ChatGPT subscriber I use it more since when I can just open a dedicated sidebar in Firefox with ChatGPT inside.

It's a joke. If ad-block has to be a plugin, AI should be a plugin. Let people decide for themselves if they want to AI in their browser.

Some great examples are the local translation engine and I believe they also added or are in the process to add a small engine that can describe images and provide caption on-demand, which is a great step towards accessibility.

TBF some of these features are also unique and something i cherish when browsing the web (e.g. container tabs). however, the devs must ask why every "new" browser is just a chromium fork in the end.

there should be a try to pivot to the core experience than feature parity to see if it actually brings more people over.

On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation.

In fact, I would like to see a basic human right that allows us sheeps to opt out of anything AI related, or anything with forced advertising or digital currency for that matter.

I believe being hardline on the organizations and products that actually respect users and choices leads to much worse outcome.

I'm using Firefox, Edge, and Chrome on phone and desktop. My main browser is Firefox on both, and I use the two others only when needed. I trust Mozilla to be more aligned with my needs than any company that creates a free tool to keep users in their ecosystem. Those companies are doing what they are supposed to do, and as a person, it's my responsibility to use what aligns with my values. But it's important to understand that I belong to one of the many nieche types of users, and if I expect Mozilla to only target my nieche, the userbase will shrink so much that it will be unsustainable, sounds familiar?

So, as a long-time user of Firefox, I generally and cautiosly trust Mozilla, I support them when they try new features while keeping the user in control, and I don't think the evolution of products have to be stopped because some of us are too stongly attached to the old ways.

You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.

My only beef is they've basically put Claude's webpage on a side pane, with all the issues of a squished webpage.

I also think having a separate mode is really the best middle ground between an all spying ai-browser and one that has none (which makes doing some things with ai more manual)

Second set of features could be language rewriter and translator in web pages and web forums.

Third set of features: extract text notes from a web page. save it to the browser history. Allow AI chatting with this AI text enhanced browser history.

Fourth feature: Bookmark surfing. AI will individually look in each bookmark for resources and information that can be outputted based on chat requests.

The first and only useful scenario in a local setting that actually would be applauded and appreciated. I don't know how it is on some systems, and how much resource it would expend in energy. It wont slow down Firefox off the shelf, because Firefox won't scour the AI index, unprompted.

Edit: rearranged paragraphs.

Chat apps, are replacing a lot the old way we consume information and search. That is mostly made thru browser. So I see the vision is follow this transformation to keep market share and offer an alternative to big players.

Mozilla and Firefox loosing market share and revenue too and that could bite back.

Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).

By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.

I've been test driving Waterfox and at this point I don't think I'll be going back.

Do I want it to go to some 3rd party AI service? No. Absolutely not. However, if it's configurable like the Copilot extension—where I can pick which AI I'm using—then I'm all for it. I'll just pick a model I've got in ollama and live the dream.

NOTE: I as I wrote this, Firefox underlined "ollama" in red because it failed the spellcheck. Imagine if Firefox had a proper grammar-checking AI too. That would be super useful. I'd love that!

Those who think they don't want AI in their browsers are completely lacking in imagination, IMHO.

No one wants to browse Facebook or Reddit or whatever. The interfaces are user hostile or horrible. If we could interact with our own, private interface and the outcome was submitted to some text/web LLM that then did the interaction with the actual websites, then we would actually be able to use the public internet.

It's possible that this software shouldn't be a browser though, but something else, possibly something which is built on top of a browser engine.

While I really appreciate its existence, I was surprised by the amount of corporate stuff I had to remove setting it up: Frontpage ads from their supporters, search offering completions and extras that border on ads as well, the AI bar being pushed through a popup tutorial…

It definitely felt different from other free software, distinctly similar to a for-profit app in a bad way. All the crap was removable in settings, but still.

It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of value.

I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.

I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.

Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.

I don't need this. I don't want this. I did not ask for this.

I think what we here see is that commercial interests ruin a browser.

The AI things are pushed by an idea to make firefox more marketable to companies. So Mozilla gets more money, at the expense of users. This is the sad reality that explains why Mozilla behaves that way. Google too by the way.

It's just not a very good fit for Firefox. I assume it would run on a cloud service, which is very much a privacy issue. Especially because it appears to be something "free", making my data the product.

But I don't blame Mozilla though, cause are loosing market share, and maybe they think this is a way to gain more market share?

I just like their browser, I don't need any of this other stuff.

HN spent a year discussing the threat that AI posed to Google Search. Well, if it threatens search, then it threatens the browser. They're hedging. How frequently does Mozilla get criticized for failing to do X Y or Z to change with the times (or for doing it late? for having too much ambition, or not enough, sometimes at the same time?).

The fact of the matter is that they're already struggling to remain relevant as it is, and their competitors have been dabbling in this space for a while. They're already going to have the infrastructure, because local LLMs works really well for translation (and being able to do content translation without sending all the content off to Google is obviously a sensible feature for Firefox to have). There's no reason to not at least try to match their competitors. Especially if they could potentially hit on some "killer app", which is really the only way at this point to make up any significant ground in marketshare in a market that is otherwise entirely commodified.

Here's some ways I can think of:

- seamless integration with local models

- opt in and opt out experience when needed

- ai instrumentation (so fill up tedious long web forms for me)

- ai and accessibility

these are off the top of my head.

it boggles my mind that there are so many convinced that AI doesn't offer good use cases for a browser.

I think the "how they introduce it" part is crucial and it doesn't look like Mozilla has cracked that nut from the announcement. but to say no one wants this is just not true and short sighted.

Mozilla, you are still on time to reroute your efforts to regain the users you'd lost by crap like this.

Anyway, I would be more afraid of agents than just AI answering about things, generating images/music or whatever. That could affect much more than just privacy.

But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent releases.

You can't be all things to all people.

All other features should come via add-ons.

Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.

Whether you like it or not, and regardless of your view on the current state of “AI” and where it’s headed, the undeniable fact is that “AI” has been and is in the zeitgeist now and will continue to be for at least another year or two. If Mozilla Firefox does not show anything on something like this, the general public and the general tech writers (not as invested in Firefox) would write it off further. If Mozilla Firefox does something like this, then the diehard fans will be up in arms about what they see as distractions (and to be frank, Mozilla has had more than a few over the years).

What matters is if Mozilla listens to feedback from a diverse audience instead of being swayed by any specific group. It’s not easy. I’d rather Mozilla try something and goof up or fail instead of just being left behind due to inaction.

This assertion is relying on facts not in evidence.

I don't see how AI would improve my experience, although I have found myself using the fast answer AI summaries in DuckDuckGo a bit more over time.

My initial inclination is to root for a less busy browser.

Two points on that. First, OP addresses this by noting that when mozilla asked the community what they wanted, the replies from the community were overwhelmingly opposed to any sort of AI integration in the browser. That at least indicates that the people who are actively following firefox development are substantially against this kind of feature. It's not just "I and the people I talk to don't want this" -- clearly a very important subset of firefox power users don't want it.

In other words, the people that are actively going out of their way to choose firefox now, would actively dislike having the browser move in this direction. Sure, maybe the idea is that there are people out there who are longing to be one fewer click away from chatgpt, who is actively choosing their browser based on having access to such things... to which I say... really??? But more to the point, that's probably not the kind of user who will choose firefox over whatever corporate-captured competitor is adding chatbots to their browser yesterday.

Second, my personal position, which seems to be echoed by some other commenters, is that, whether or not people do want this, they shouldn't want it. It is bad for users and for the world to have it available, it will make the web worse as sites are rewritten to cater to the bots, and it's going to have to be ripped out in a few years anyway when it becomes clear that the true costs of this stuff are unsustainable.

Firefox and Thunderbird, that is it. Everything else was just a ridiculous time and money sink which should've just been spent on those core products.

I think the author does not speak for me

Summarizing, explaining pages directly, without copying to another app. Reading pages out aloud. Maybe even orchestrating research sessions, by searching and organizing...

Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.

We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.

Features are supposed to be helpful when you need it. Instead of block your way and pretend it's the only way you can do it, or designed to annoying you to make you turn it on accidentally.

Can Firefox do the bare minimum? It doesn't even have dark mode, which Chrome has had for years.

I don't want pocket, "Normandy" (botnet), Mozilla Sync, Mozilla shilling a VPN and checking all my emails against darknet lists, none of that, certainly not by default. Just render web fast, don't phone home, give me dark mode and a decent reader mode, put fucking RSS back in.

People use Firefox because they want privacy respecting software with good customizability. What Mozilla should be focusing is making their "vanilla" experience as good as possible and keep working on tools which further help user privacy.

Firefox should be performant, compatible, well polished and have the best privacy tools available. Focusing on anything else will make it just a worse version of another browser.

To be honest this makes me really question the leadership of Mozilla. Who is deciding this? And what are these decisions based on. I doubt that it is actual user research.

Like, what were they thinking?

I'm glad that they have a single about:config option to turn it all off. First thing I did the minute I saw an "Ask AI" item appear in my right-click context menu.

It honestly feels like a plague worse than ads. At least ads I can block in various ways.

> Could Not Give Kudos

>Kudos could not be given to the message for the following reason: > Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed messages per minute.

Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.

If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time ago.

Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might pay for YT if they did that.

Well, the brilliant thing here is, if it's so easy to come up with novel applications of new technology... Firefox is open source! Go make it yourself!

I can’t roll my eyes any harder when I hear some ad like “How can agentic AI reshape CRM for your workforce?”

Whether it will actually do any of those things is another question of course.

Fixed that for you greed dbags.

I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.

Was this intentional or just a complete lack of attention to detail? Even their own screenshot contradicts this.

Does it matter? Yes. "Window AI" suggests there is an AI manager, where as "AI Window" suggests an isolated environment.

The current AI is not there yet at least not in terms of speed.

Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.

Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.

Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.

And now Firefox.

Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.

AI = cloud = insecure bullshit

It starts at the top when executives are incentivized to run the company this way and it trickles down to everyone else--since they need big deliverables, their underlings are accountable for delivering parts of those, and then the underlings' underlings for the next part, etc... and everybody is especially rewarded if they can invent recognizable deliverables, because the whole chain above them sees that they can benefit from promoting / hyping up that work. Which feeds the whole lie: everyone is pretending to be valuable in the same way and benefits from everyone else also pretending.

But at no point does it serve the users, because the whole thing is built on a foundational cognitive dissonance: since "doing well at work" looks like "delivering big results", everybody is pressured to buy into the lie that the big results are the best thing to do be doing. So even if nobody really believes it completely, everybody has to believe it a little bit, just to survive, and then it becomes ambiently true even if nobody even likes it.

None of this would be possible in a world where there wasn't so much free money going around. If you have to do an actually good job by the users to survive in a competitive environment, you have no time to waste on on doing a fake good job to impress the board/executives/big donors.

The funny thing is: I'm pretty sure this type of incentive structure came into existence because of the bizarre dynamics of public companies and short-termism: big deliverables looks like delivering value aka the stock price stays good, so public companies are incentivized to operate that way. But now it's such a cult (everyone does OKRs!) that it infects even the ostensibly-nonprofit organizations as well; it's baked into the culture of bad leadership that Google exports everywhere else.

(Probably there are a few other things driving this framework also. For one thing "big deliverables" are good for salespeople to have something to talk about: the big purchasers are just as clueless about what makes software good for the users as everybody else at their level is. And probably it also comes from executives need things to impress their buddies with. But I refuse to believe that most of the executives trumpeting AI initiatives genuinely believe in them; even if a few do, I'm convinced that most of them are just pretending because they have to to keep their jobs.)

This is why companies run by "engineer"-mindset people are so inspiring in comparison. Just once I'd like to see a big corp do the actual right work instead of all this pretend fake-ass BS. But it feels impossible to change while somehow they are still getting rich off of it. There's so much free money in this industry that idiots just do shitty work and get rich anyway because competition isn't strong enough to destroy them. Sigh. And of course sometimes they get lucky and make something good by accident, too. Or just make something shitty but stick ads in it and for some reason that works because for mysterious and probably-grifty reasons nobody can compete on preventing that either.

Thanks for reading my thesis on why the tech industry is so disappointing.

there's so much stuff that could get much better if they invested more in AI features -- tab grouping, translation, ad blockers; why are people so triggered? because it might end up being bad?

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/DPn_Re5AAkN/