Mozilla is developing a built‑in AI assistant for Firefox that will be offered as a third browsing mode alongside Normal and Private tabs. They’re calling it “Window AI.” Details are still scarce.

“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
    112·
    13 hours ago

    It depends. If it’s just for the sake of plugging AI because it’s cool and trendy, fuck no.

    If it’s to improve privacy, accessibility and minimize our dependency on big tech, then I think it’s a good idea.

    A good example of AI in Firefox is the Translate feature (Project Bergamot). It works entirely locally, but relies on trained models to provide translation on-demand, without having Google, etc as the middle-man, and Mozilla has no idea what you translates, just which language model(s) you downloaded.

    Another example is local alt-text generation for images, which also requires a trained model. Again, works entirely locally, and provide some accessibility to users with a vision impairment when an image doesn’t provide caption.

    • arkitectnaut@lemmy.ml
      31·
      10 hours ago

      Totally agree. Just because generally AI is bad and used in stupid ways, it doesn’t mean that all AI is useless or without meaning. Clearly if you look at the trends, people are using chatbots as search engines. This is not Mozilla forcing anything on us, we are doing this. At that point I much prefer them to develop a system that lets us use gpts to surf the web in the most convenient and private way possible. So far I have been very happy with how Mozilla has implemented AI in Firefox. I don’t feel the bloat, it is not shoved in my face, and it is under my control. We don’t have to make it a witch hunt. Not everything is either horrible or beautiful.