Share your feedback on the AI services experiment in Nightly

[asafko]

Hi folks, 

In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it. 

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Firefox Labs (please see full instructions here). 

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier.

Thanks so much for helping us improve Firefox!

[Jon]

Thanks for the feedback! For those interested, there's another idea thread for a second sidebar here:

2nd Sidebar 

[ksetlak]

I have one observation: I'm logged in to Google on my work laptop and my work Google account is the primary one, while the private one is the secondary. However, I only use Gemini with my private account. I can't change the account I'm using in the side-docked window, because when I attempt to do that, a new tab is opened in my main Firefox window. Would be lovely if this was configurable and `authuser=1` could be added to the params in the URL used to open the side pane.

[Mardak]

Google does support multiple active accounts where in your case https://gemini.google.com/u/0/ is probably your primary work account and https://gemini.google.com/u/1/ is your private account. Currently, the sidebar defaults to the first account logged in, so if you could sign in first with your private account, that should get it to work.

Firefox also supports Container Tabs, which is useful for sites that don't normally support multiple accounts. If you logged in to your work Google account with a "Work" container while your private account is logged in to a regular tab (not container), this might work for you too.

Alternatively, you could specify a custom provider for the desired Gemini url to get that in the sidebar for simple chatting, but currently Gemini doesn't support passing in prompts when customized this way.

 

[0x4d6165]

Actually listen to your userbase for *once* when we say we do NOT want this! Be a good web browser stop trying to be edge.

[AdventureGamer]

#FireEdge

[Reycko]

Would be nice to have a nice UI to add custom prompts if that's not in the works already

[aminought]

You can! Just edit "browser.ml.chat.prompt.prefix" and "browser.ml.chat.prompts.*" prefs. Also, you can add additional prompts like "Answer Questions" if you add "browser.ml.chat.prompts.3", "browser.ml.chat.prompts.4", etc.

[Mardak]

Any suggestions on what's a nice UI for adding custom prompts? The current way with about:config preferences is more for advanced testers, but it could work for you in the meantime. Or if not, what prompts were you wanting to add and perhaps we can add it to the default list.

[myspace]

Thanks going to try it out now!

[FastBrowser2022]

I tried using the right click > Simplify text option with Gemini. It worked the first time, but the 2nd time Gemini did a bot check. It otherwise worked fine after completing it.

I also tested it with Chat-GPT 4o, this worked for summarizing the same text and simplifying content.

However I noticed there is no context menu option to simply highlight text and re-write text in an unsubmitted text input field

[Mardak]

A quick test of this text input field for replying 📝 seems to work for selecting the text and passing it to the chatbot 🤖. However the current sidebar integration requires copy/pasting the result back to the original text input field 📋.

What were you wanting to do with this if it was more seamless? 🤔

 

[lackey]

Considering the privacy problems, corporate centralization, and environmental issues caused by the companies represented in Mozilla's AI chatbot integration, I have some potential recommendations, ranked from most to least palatable.

• Entirely discontinue this experiment and stop pursuing AI.
• Cannibalize the work done for integrating these 4 proprietary websites into Firefox, and use it for allowing users to add any website of their choice to the sidebar (like Floorp, Edge, or Vivaldi).
• Continue developing AI, but as a browser extension that is not shipped with Firefox.
• Continue developing AI, and ship it as a browser extension that can be fully erased by users if they so choose.

[piradata]

these two last ones are not the same? would be just a new extension on the mozilla store, like adguard or multiaccount containers, simply tab groups, etc

[Mardak]

It sounds like the primary concern is based on the initial list of companies providing the chatbots. Are there other companies that have better privacy, corporate, environmental aspects that should be included? We've since added Anthropic and will add more choices that people want.

[advpod]

No.

Stop adding dumb trendy features. Spend engineering effort on integrating features that have nothing to do with browsing the web into a web browser. If I wanted to use a chatbot, I would install a chatbot app onto my computer. Features that have nothing to do with browsing the web have no place being in a web browser.

[Mardak]

How many people install separate chatbot apps vs access from a web browser? It seems like many people who do use chatbots are already using a web browser and likely manually copy/pasting information from tab to tab.

Your point of non-browser usage is still interesting, so could you provide some more concrete examples?

[eladio77]

Amazing feature. I find the funtion, but when i have active the vertical tabs i can not see the Boton "Chat IA", only i can see it without "Vertical Tabs" active. Can you add the shortcut access to the Vertical Tab menu?

[Mardak]

If you're referring to the new "sidebar.revamp" (with "sidebar.verticalTabs"), you should now have the AI chatbot icon available as shortcut access in today's Nightly.

 

[mcortt]

Very nice! But please add a keyboard shortcut to open it as well.

Edit: I didn't see where you had replied to my earlier suggestion. Please disregard, sorry!

[eladio77]

Thanks..  is working ...

[nclm]

Please Mozilla, don’t get lost. AI chatbots is a very silly feature, and it makes it hard to take you seriously. I know investors love it these days when tech companies integrate anything “AI” in their product, but you’re Mozilla, we all expect you to behave differently and for the good of the users and the web. There is no demand for AI chatbots, only unsolicited offer from the tech world, please don’t be part of this! There is nothing ethical about about offering a feature that is consistently giving misinformation based on stolen data processed on energy and water wasting machines. It would be lovely if you could focus your ressources on actually improving the browser and on communication campaigns to get more users, not on jumping on the latest fad. Thank you ❤️

[Mardak]

Have you found any uses of AI chatbots for your own situation? It sounds like you correctly don't trust the responses, and others with similar concerns can still find value with these tools such as entertainment.

[AdventureGamer]

What is entertaining about weakening the privacy standards of one of the only browsers worthy of respect in the whole internet? I love you Firefox. Please, please, please don't ruin what you have. You'll force me off my only & favorite browser. To be frank, if Firefox becomes Chrome with a coat of paint, I'll bail I swear to god - and I won't be the only one. What will investors say then? You're the last bastion of integrity in the whole game. Don't throw that away...

[wutongtaiwan]

I want the AI chatbot feature, it's free, unlimited and no account login, and there are no geographical restrictions, and I don't want to be blocked because I'm in China

[Mardak]

Are you able to download and run a https://llamafile.ai as that would be free, unlimited and no account login. It runs on your computer, so you don't need internet access to chat, but it could be slow depending on your hardware.

[wutongtaiwan]

It would be even better if AI could be used for search, enabling an open-source AI model locally, and when searching, the AI aggregates the search results and answers them in the form of a human conversation, just like a chatbot

[Mardak]

Are you suggesting the chatbot to look at the search result page content or would you expect Firefox/chatbot visit some linked pages for you? There are AI services that do this like https://perplexity.ai that you could configure as a custom provider and also supports passing in your custom prompts.

[wutongtaiwan]

I want the chatbot to look at the content of the search results page, summarize it based on the content, and answer in human language

[Mardak]

Something like this?

[wutongtaiwan]

yes

[piradata]

Loved the feature, I always have a open tab just for chatgpt, so its a big win, and its nice that it can be disabled or opt in/out for people that don't like it.

What I miss is just a way to simply open the chat on the sidebar, the only way I found is to right click and chose one option in 'Summarize', 'Simplify Language' or 'Quiz Me', but neither of these options can be used to just open a plain clear new chat, and if I close the sidebar, there is no way to open it again on the previous conversation.

What i would suggest, is simply a button on the bookmark toolbar, to simply open close the chat, that would suffice already 🙂

[Mardak]

You can Customize toolbar to add a sidebar toggle button, and the chatbot will open a plain new chat. If you are logged in to some chat providers, you should be able to access previous conversations as well. Potentially Firefox could restore the last conversation, but others might prefer a clear chat, so maybe we could restore when reopening as well as provide a button to start new?

The improved sidebar also has a button to open/close the AI chatbot (as well as other sidebar tools).

[francois79]

Hey

Thanks for the work done.

I do not understand why you plug only onto private llm services where some of them are using private llm 

My ideal is to be able to connect to llm model server such as https://github.com/ollama/ollama
Or https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm
Best through proxies https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm

Is it possible?

[Mardak]

You can configure a custom provider to any url including those running on a local server such as your own computer. At a glance, it looks like there's various web UIs for ollama that can be separately installed, so you could at least have a private chatbot in the sidebar, but I'm not sure if any of them currently accepts passing in prompts. https://llamafile.ai is another llm model server that has a built in web chat interface that accepts ?q=prompt urls.

Potentially Firefox can directly interface with these services to render a custom Firefox chatbot or power non-chatbot experiences instead of currently requiring a web chat interface.

[SpidFightFR-Dev]

Hey guys, i just tried to nightly version, with AI stuff.

Honestly it's good, but it would better fit the standards of privacy Mozilla displays if it was possible to download and run models (E.G: 7b llama3 or Mixtral models) from the web browser (considering the pc running firefox is powerful enough). In a similar fashion of GPT4All.

It would allow for a less-powerfull yet completely offline model execution.

Just food for thoughts, it's similar to the "localhost" approach with locallama, it's not very practical on windows for example, it would require a docker instance running on wsl to make something clean.

Peace - Spid. ✌️

[Mardak]

I believe GPT4All exposes an inference http API but not a chatbot page that could be shown in the Firefox sidebar. Currently Firefox is rendering (potentially local) server-provided html in the sidebar, but we could build our own Firefox chat interface to show the results of inference -- potentially handled directly within Firefox similar to translations and alt-text or a server of your choice such as GPT4All running your preferred model.

Are there any particular use cases that you think must be handled with a local model?

[Anonymous]

This whole thing flies in the face of the Mozilla Manifesto.

[Mardak]

Are there privacy-focused models that you would recommend? This chatbot feature is compatible with locally running llamafile with models that can be trained on data you find acceptable. Even if the quality of these models aren't comparable yet, hopefully we can help others try them out and contribute to these efforts so that we can get them to a quality level to include by default in Firefox.

[ffffff]

I believe the bigger issue to people isn't a perceived lack of ability to use models that are:

• Locally running
• Open source
• Trained on data you find acceptable

Rather, the core issue is that it seems Mozilla is promoting and incentivizing people to run models that are:

• Running on computers they don't own and have no control over
• Closed, proprietary, and in the hands of companies with horrible reputations
• Trained on data that people often find unacceptable or believe was unethically sourced

Furthermore, these models also:

• Consistently fail at delivering information in a safe and trustworthy manner
• Save data you provide them to use in furthering their objectives at the cost of user privacy

Even the Mozilla manifesto—I know it's not a rigid set of internal rules or anything, but just for the sake of argument—boldly states:

• 4. Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
  
  Throwing unaware users at OpenAI doesn't seem like a good way of protecting their privacy.

Then there are additional concerns, such as the tight coupling with the browser (due to reasonable limitations or not is beside the point), or the fact that Mozilla is, in a manner, endorsing and enabling these companies and their practices.

So it's understandable that this feature just isn't right to a lot of people.

I understand Firefox must remain a competitive browser if it wants to regain market share. I am aware that many are implementing similar features, and nobody wants to fall behind. I know that many users are, in fact, quite excited about this feature. Maybe the developers are, as well. Hell, even I admit I'd love to have a somehow technomagically ethically-sourced and ran LLM helping me around the web.

However, I imagine this is a very sensitive topic for a significant amount of people. There is a lot of frustration with current AI trends and big tech, especially among the most tech-aware users. I think it's safe to assume that if this reaches stable as it is, there will be much valid complaining and criticism towards Mozilla. Either you already knew this, or you didn't think far enough ahead.

Sadly, I'm not sure what's the right answer here. I sincerely hope you folks manage to figure it out.

But asking...

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@Mardak wrote:

Are there privacy-focused models that you would recommend?

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...with all respect, seems very tone-deaf considering all this.

[Mardak]

I asked about privacy-focused models because there was a specific comment about training data before it was edited and made anonymous.