What purpose is served by having AI built-in to the browser?
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)).
… by submitting queries to another website that only does what’s ruining search engines.
No, llamafile Is local, and it could do multiple search engine for you, or skip results contained in the first pages which are usually only ads or there because they pay to be there. And it could start searching the fediverse too
Ah yes, the update nobody actually wants…
For me it’s useful, depending how it’s implemented. Being able to say “summarize this article” or “summarize this ToS and call out anything that’s anti consumer” is how I use chatgpt
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.
Well I’m guessing they actually did testing on local AI using a 4GB and 8GB RAM laptop and realized it would be an awful user experience. It’s just too slow.
I wish they rolled it in as an option though.
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).
I know about that. I used to use Epiphany myself. The problem is that it’s unpopular, still not nearly as good as the other options and there’s no cross-platform support. The last one is a big problem because 90% of the market uses Android or Windows.
Cross platform and popular I agree with. Having it in a state where it could be the default for gnome distros would help with popularity. However I think at least in latest versions its pretty comparable to other browsers at least Firefox. Main issue is there isn’t as much extensions that work with it. Considering the pace it is improving though I think it won’t be long till it could be viable alternative at least on Linux, maybe it might get ported some day idk.
Their new CEO is a McKinsey consultant so this is pretty much guaranteed.
Uggggh mozilla no one wants this
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)