- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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I spent much of the last week having the distinct honor of serving as MC at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona
Thanks for telling me you work for Mozilla, this instantly invalidates the rest of your Mozilla praise.
AI is the new bit of crap you now have to disable when visiting family. new apple device? disable in settings, disable in firefox, disable in duckduckgo. i see the benefit of ML in sciences but for gen consumers it’s just more personal data collection for sale so it can fuck right off
Regular, non-expert internet users find it fun, or even amusing, to play gacha games. And yet the sentiment about a potential new gacha game panel built into Firefox has been overwhelmingly negative. While sophisticated gamer aesthetes find those creations gauche or even offensive, other cultures find them perfectly addictive.
Most of the people that see gacha games as a valuable use of their time on this earth belong to demographics that are dismissed by all you internet weirdos. It’s an incredibly mainstream experience now. Regular people have no problem collecting trading cards, making the numbers go up, and spending money on in-game purchases. If Firefox wants to keep up with the times it needs a built-in gacha game so that it can protect the privacy of all the billions of people who will see it and understand that Firefox is the web browser and gacha game platform made for them.
“Regular” internet users don’t use Firefox though. And adding a dumb game to the browser won’t change that.
I consider myself “above” a regular internet user, as in I’ve hosted Lemmy just for the experience and recently moved all my services to a closed mesh for security and because I can.
Firefox have lost me as well, so who is it for these days?
For now, it’s for the guys at Librewolf who keep the garbage out for me.
But yeah…. future doesn’t look great with Mozilla’s choices the last few years.
The LibreWolf team communication was unclear after they originally decided NOT to remove Mozilla’s AI nonsense. Could you point me to a clear statement or a git commit that shows me they’ve removed the AI components and I’ll consider going back to LibreWolf.
If Henry Ford had given his users what they wanted, he would have built a faster horse.
Users want AI right now because a lot of people have spent a lot of money to convince them they want it. A few years ago, they wanted crypto and VR; a few more years from now, they’ll want something else. We’re already seeing evidence that the current AI boom is an unsustainable bubble. Will “hundreds of millions of users” still be using ChatGPT after OpenAI’s investors get tired of losing billions of dollars every year, and decide it’s time to start squeezing their customers for more cash?
This kind of trend-chasing is what happens when the people in charge have no real principles or vision underlying their actions. Firefox didn’t beat Internet Explorer by following the crowd; it won by delivering a product that was better, and doing things nobody else had done before (like tabs). In order to do that, the people making it had to have a strong vision of what a “better” browser would look like.
A few years ago, they wanted crypto and VR
Funny you should mention that because the 2010 Webby Award Winner who wrote this article was also involved in developing a blockchain platform in 2014 which according to Wikipedia “has since been called the first implementation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”
I wonder what he’s doing now…
“I don’t want AI”
“Actually you do though, but if you don’t then you’re an out of touch pretentious old weirdo and should just shut the fuck up”
More like “Sure, but plenty of your non-techy friends and family do.” Otherwise the article wouldn’t have said that Mozilla needs to add a single toggle to disable all AI features to Firefox.
Don’t expect ex-reddit-users to read the actual article…
Firefox translation is AI. Should they remove that?
Using third party translation services just like I want to use third party AI services instead of built-in AI is a price I’m willing to pay to come back to Firefox.
People don’t want Firefox translation because they “want AI,” though. They want it because being able to translate web pages is a useful feature. I think it’s quite telling that nowhere in the linked article does the author actually defend Firefox’s new “Window AI” feature as useful. Instead, the only argument he can make for it is that AI is popular.
If it’s less accurate than previously used methods of translations? Yes.
If it consumes more resources than previously used methods of translations? Yes.
There were no previous methods of translation.
I’ve been using copy and paste to translation websites both before and after Firefox implemented translation.
Ok so pasting it into another AI. I dont get how this changes anything.
The point is that people say they dont want AI features. But they really dont want chatbot features and are happy with AI being used for text prediction, translation, text to speech, speech to text, OCR and other useful features. Mozilla set themselves apart by adding these features on device and it was a much appreciated privacy step.
They’ve failed a lot with ai like website building, summerization, tab grouping. But the do need to try otherwise thry wikl always be considered the old browser lacking modern features instead of the bleeding edge trailblazing browser they should be.
Them it’s pretty far down my list of objections. It’s not automatically enabled and hasn’t been too slow or heavy in my experience.
How about making it a nice plugin? Could it be something that is optional and not hard to disable? Or is that too much to ask?
