Technology

The main use for AI that I've seen in my circles is a search engine replacement. Not because AI is a good search engine, but because search engines have largely become useless.

If Mozilla wants to cement their place, create a better search engine. It's how Google came to control a huge portion of the internet, and there's now a huge vacuum waiting for someone to replace what we lost.

I feel stupid for asking but what is an AI agentic browser even supposed to do? Search things based on your query? Well search bars have been a thing since forever. 🤷

very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats

Not even translation? That’s probably the biggest browser AI feature.

What seems really off to me is that Firefox has one standout feature that people really love: extensions. You can customize your browser however you want. So it makes sense that if they wanted to integrate AI into their design that it should be done via extensions. They could produce a mozilla-approved pack of extensions which add whatever AI features they want to offer. That way any AI functionality is opt-in, and transparent in the sense that you have a specific feature set for each extension so you kind-of know what you're buying into, rather than having a built-in set of opt-out features that are ill-defined and constantly changing. Such a radical and unnecessary change of their whole design philosophy seems very suspect to me.

They just got a new CEO that is likely a tech bro that wants to follow Microsoft into the abyss.

Rich people seem to have kind of obsession about the ai. It MUST be stuffed into every single thing for some reason, no matter if its detrimental or not. I wonder if its because if the ai thing fails, it means trillions might evaporate.

... what Firefox is trying to do.

Milk a bubble.

They fear falling behind other browsers and losing users because of it.

They see AI prevalence and see it as an opportunity to profile and position Mozilla as a leader in "ethical ai".

They see AI use cases and success and think they have to integrate it to have additional, useful, significant features.

How wide of a margin could it possibly be when their market share is in the single digits?

Edit: I looked it up. Their market share is 2.3%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

The thing is, Let’s say that there’s a foolproof system in place which makes you press an “ok” button every time is going to take an action on your behalf…how many people are actually going to check everything that it’s going to do every single time it asks? And for those that do, is it actually going to save them any time?

Just look at cookie pop ups. I have Consent-O-Matic and when that fails i manually reject and on those sites where you have to individually untick 100 boxes I just find another site, but i can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen just accept everything because it’s quicker. That’s exactly how most people would treat a “do you want me to do this?” prompt from an agentic AI without checking what it’s actually asking to do.

I use Safari on Mac and can tell you that more and more sites are breaking when I have content blockers and privacy features enabled. It feels like the days when sites were developed for IE and barely functioned on other browsers.

you can try floorp, librewolf? ironfox breaks some sites you only do in PRIVATE , but majority are just fine.

Waterfox user here. Yes with waterfox.

Librewolf and IronFox (android) both work like a charm! Well, in IronFox's case you might have to tweak JIT and WASM to ensure some niche extensions work, but I'm pretty sure it's a me thing.

I also used Fennec (android) for a hot second, and that has extensions too.

also yes for librewolf

If numbers and statistics worked, People would have dropped this AI bullshit 6 months ago.

Iirc aren't all iOS browsers just reskinned safari?