Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
Yep. I use it a lot. It's nice when you're getting started on some new topic, and as someone whose attention bounces and then sticks hard for a while, it has made getting started on topics much faster for me. I personally do want it in a browser, because that's... pretty much the only way I use LLMs.
I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".
I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.
Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
I think AI can add a lot of functionality but on the margins. Making things “work better”. I think AI as a focal point—in that it is The feature is a mistake for most things. But making code completion work better or suggestions more accurate? Things that are largely invisible UI-wise.
More and more people now start with an AI assistant instead of traditional browsing — not because they love AI everywhere, but because it’s simply faster than navigating websites.
The shift is already visible: assistants can surface structured information directly, and they’re beginning to prioritize citations, so sources that are clear and machine-readable get more visibility.
If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.
That's what I've been saying for some time now...
"No one really wants AI! They want their software to be faster or better, but do they care if the people in the background of the image have been removed by AI or not?" And in fact they don't.
Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.
Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.
And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
Yes, exactly. AI has its uses and can sometimes be extremely useful. But at this point it's not nearly as ubiquitously useful as various companies would want us to believe, based on how much they're forcing it on us, pushing it in our faces, shoving it down our throats, etc. I don't want that. I'll use it if and when I want to, thank you very much. Microsoft is of course the worst offender.
What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.
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.
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.
There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the masses.
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.
Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions.
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.
I agree with your point and have long disliked when Firefox squanders their limited resources on side quests - which is too often. But, to 'steelman' their motivation to 'do something' on AI, this analysis article sums up why major AI and browser vendors are pushing : https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-31-openai-atlas-ai-....
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
Wrong, Google wants it very much. Otherwise there would be a usable, well-maintained web browser without AI on the market and everyone would just use it
I do, the "go to a website to use AI" era is taking too long, I want full integration. I don't want to use websites or apps, I want to ask for things using human language and get a human-like response. I tire of all these interfaces.
What is most upsetting is that they just offered access to the large commercial AI providers and no clear way to have a self-hosted or alternative option. THIS is where they lost their way. They must be profiting or partnering, no longer serving the community.
If I could get Firefox to perform searches on my behalf via the AI sidebar that would be amazing! Are you kidding me? YES I WANT THIS!
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.
I think it could be nice in the longer term, as AI gets better. Especially if it's local.
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.
Well, there are all these alternative browsers like Comet, Atlas, and a few others that are doing similar things. And I'd be very surprised if Google isn't going to push more features via Chrome and their search engine.
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".
I’m currently moving from macOS to Linux, so I’m using Firefox as a daily driver for the first time in a decade.
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.
I don't even like AI (certainly don't like hearing about it), but I don't really have an issue with AI features. There, I said it.
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.
- 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.
These tabs will probably be similar to the tabs in browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity. And some people really do use these browsers.
Perhaps this is Mozilla's chance to monetize. Give at least some users the opportunity to use this feature and pay Mozilla.
I connected Claude to Firefox's ai pane and honestly I feel that this a good middle ground. I don't want an AI browser but I appreciate being able to have ai access specific pages when I have questions.
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)
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.
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.
I couldn't disagree more. I want responsible AI and i would expect Mozilla to lead the way on how to do this when it comes to browsers (they were pioneers when it came to containers and privacy control).
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] threadI know there are tools where you can do it yourself but it is a hellish mess. I just move it drive to drive through the decades until it comes.
I like to have AI only when I specifically want it. Usually I just code in Emacs. If I specifically want help with something then for an IDE experience I will use the TRAE coding agent. For command line, I will use gemini-cli or codex. I like to use AI coding help 4 or 5 times a week. As an example, today I wanted some Python code that used a few libraries converted to Common Lisp (using several popular CL libraries). TRAE one-shotted this for me in two minutes. I think it would have taken me over 20 minutes to write it myself.
AI is OK for easy stuff you can do yourself, and save time.
The book AI Atlas tells a good narrative about natural resources used for AI, BTW.
AI ad blocking might be nice.
a sandboxed LLM ad block or filter could be handy, for instance
Absolutely. I want a browser with AI -- just not the browser Mozilla wants to build. I want my browser to use AI-based adblocking and content filtering. I want my AI browser to notice when the site sends some stupid sticky high Z-index thing down the pipe and just quietly not show it to me at all. I want my AI browser to automatically detect cookie dialogs and click "Reject All" and if that option isn't available, I want it to parse the "Cookie Preferences" page and click all the buttons that equate to "Reject All".
I want an AI layer in my phone that spoofs my location and my contacts so that apps that insist on seeing those things see fake data that nevertheless looks plausible.
Best of all, I want the AI agents in my browser and my phone to do their work without leaving any trace of their activities so that the server on the other end cannot tell that I even have an AI agent at all.
Most of the above is possible now but it requires a plethora of different tools that are not cleanly integrated. And no VC is going to pay you to build such an integrated tool because it would not create a continuing revenue stream or a continuing stream of harvestable data compromising the user's privacy.
We are a very fucked-up industry.
If the web doesn’t adapt, a lot of high-quality content will slowly disappear from the “AI layer” of discovery.
We’re trying to document this shift here: https://github.com/ai-first-guides/first.ai/blob/main/docs/i...
Managers think they want AI but they actually want their people to work faster or better. Higher managers think they want AI so they can save money, or at least not fall behind the competitors, if those were to use AI to get an advantage.
Companies making software think they want AI because their competitors are using it, and they think the users want AI so the software can be perceived as modern, not falling behind.
And so on, and so on... other than Nvidia, openAI, Anthropic, etc, no one really wants AI.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I just think Firefox is taking the wrong approach. Trying to run with the pack of large commercial entities supporting their multi-prong corporate agendas does nothing for Firefox long-term (while annoying their users and looking like a buzzword-chasing 'me too'). This is a perfect example of when Firefox should zig instead of zag. Per the article I linked:
> “the hard part of an AI browser is not chat, it’s process and trust isolation.”
Instead of feature parity on AI, Firefox should race to technically position with APIs as the friendliest 'host browser' for AI companies outside the big five (eg "everyone else"). That gets some AI vendors actually recommending Firefox as the "works best with..." option instead of ignoring FF. Plus AI projects, researchers and LocalLLama-type hobbyists will be attracted. Sure, that's currently a small segment but they have high-potential for growth. It's very early days and today's AI leaders may not be tomorrow's AI giants.
I recently switched to Firefox to continue using uBlock, and was honestly shocked to find out that it actually has more restrictions in terms of where you're allowed to install extensions from.
You literally cannot install extensions that are not signed by Mozilla at all unless you use a different beta version of Firefox.
It's like going from YouTube to Tiktok, for most content we consume, you could cut 90% of it without losing anything of value.
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.
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".
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.
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.
- 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.