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!

[wutongtaiwan]

You can learn about Brave's AI features.After entering the search term in the address bar, the AI option will appear,After clicking, a chatbot on the side will appear to reply to the content related to the search term,I recommend using Mozilla's own AI,I don't trust other companies' AI,I believe Mozilla can better protect privacy,And this AI should have no chat limit、No login required、No geographical restrictions,Chat history is only stored on the local computer

[Mardak]

I believe that feature isn't necessarily on search engine result page as it can generally include the page contents to the chatbot. Are you wanting the Firefox feature to automatically share the page with the chatbot instead of requiring text selection?

[wutongtaiwan]

Maybe you can give a button to choose whether or not you want to share the page. I think Brave's AI is more helpful and useful to me

[wutongtaiwan]

I'm willing to share the page with the chatbot, but there may be some privacy-conscious people who will object, so a toggle can be provided in the browser settings for the user to decide whether to enable it or not, and not to enable it by default.

[Mardak]

Would a different interaction, e.g., a dedicated "share page" button, separate from the current text-selection interaction work? Instead of a toggle, someone could decide not to make use of a 1-click "summarize" or "help me understand" on a search result page.

A toggle could also be useful such as part of another action, e.g., share the page with chatbot when opening reader view, so it's still one interaction after enabling?

[wutongtaiwan]

I feel like it's a little better to separate the share page button from the text selection interaction

[SoliTheFox]

Awesome! Can we get an easier way to set up custom providers? And maybe a shortcut to summarize an entire page?

Using the about:config, i managed to get ollama with open-webui working, but noticed that every time i switch to other providers i need to set it up again on the settings.

Would also be lovely to be able to add custom prompts more easily. Finally, being able to provide the chatbot with the entire page instead of just a selection would be great too.

Awesome feature, specially now with small models like Gemma2 2b achieving higher user preference than GPT-3.5 on lmsys. Gemma2 2b and open-webui are a great pair with this feature.

[WoefKat]

Would you mind explaining how you got ollama + open-webui working? I don't really understand how to do this 🙂
I have this running here on a separate server but how to integrate this into firefox isn't clear to me.

Edit: Ah I found it elsewhere in the chat, it's just simply setting browser.ml.chat.provider to my server's URL. That was easy. It doesn't offer me a translate option though (which would normally work better than firefox translate) so that would be a great option to add 🙂 I'd much rather have that than "Quiz" or "Simplify".

[Mardak]

Do you always want it to translate to the same language? Here's an example of creating a new String pref `browser.ml.chat.prompts.translate` that is set to "Translate to zh-TW"

I did need to set ollama + open-webui to have a default model, but it seems to be working fine after configuring the provider.

[WoefKat]

Yes, always to English. Thank you!

I set browser.ml.chat.prompts.translate to "Translate to English". It now shows up in the context menu, thanks! But could you tell me where to define the prompt itself? (PS: Is there documentation about this perhaps? I couldn't find it).

[Mardak]

How do you think we should expose summarizing an entire page? We're looking into ways that don't require text selection such as getting article contents or comments section. Would you want it to always summarize this selection-less text or other prompts as well?

The current behavior of custom providers isn't great for frequent switching as you noticed it is forgotten when switching to a "known" provider. Do you expect to switch among multiple custom providers? Or maybe just saving the last custom provider could be sufficient to make it easy to switch back? Are you using these as 1-off chats with the provider or do you tend to switch provider and use it for multiple chats at a time?

[SoliTheFox]

I believe that making it available in the right click menu would be awesome. For my use, summarizing the article content would be enough, but the comment section would also be nice. I think that the summarization prompt + a "talk with the page" prompt would be enough for most users. Something like "Here is the page: {page}. In the following messages I will make questions to you about the content of the page. Wait for me to ask a question.". Would be awesome to be able to easily customize/add prompts too.

Yes, being able to add and switch from and to different custom providers would be awesome. With more and more different interfaces, chatbots, etc., I think that being able to add a list of custom providers would make the feature versatile for all users. Maybe even default to have no providers at all (or one), and let the users manage which providers they want.

For my personal use, I only need the latest custom provider. But again, ideally, it would allow to add multiple custom providers at the same time.

[skulltaffy]

Joining the chorus of "no, hell no, this is the most out-of-touch thing you could try" here. It's unbelievable that Mozilla would consider this in the first place. If this gets forced through I'm either finding a way to block my Firefox install from ever updating, or finding a different browser. I don't care that it's optional: I object to it being included in the browser at all.

[skulltaffy]

Like, to reiterate here: I finally created a Firefox account purely to object to this, and I hate making accounts for things. That should say a lot.

[risingstars]

literally same. Despise having to sign in and make accounts to comment on things but like, this sucks so bad I had to

[Obligada]

Same. I wonder how many of us created accounts to comment on the subject because we all hate genAI/LLMs so much. It’s such a stupid idea and no one at Mozilla seems to listen 

[PurgingSmuggler]

I did! Watching the comments pour in after I commented there seemed to be a lot of (new user) tags so, a lot of us?

[KDPWildwood]

Same here, yeah. I've never used mozilla forums or whatever this is before. JUST joined to comment on this absurdity.

[Nobody_of_note]

Staff responses told me all I need to know.  Mozilla isn't what it used to be, and I will be switching browsers, moving any of my Mozilla services to another provider, and cancelling my subscriptions.

You don't care what we say, hopefully you'll care what we do.  Before it's too late.

[SomeOtherUser]

Do you have a browser you recommend for this? It's getting hard to find browsers that aren't based on chromium and don't have AI. I'm not very tech-literate so I don't know how to find one really.

[PurgingSmuggler]

I've seen Librewolf mentioned at the very top (?) of the thread iirc, was told Brave is also FF based and Vivaldi is apparently chromium based.

[Nobody_of_note]

Librewolf is where I'm landing.  Brave added some crypto BS a while back and I dropped it ASAP.

[PurgingSmuggler]

Oh that's very good to know!

[KDPWildwood]

I downloaded Vivaldi. I checked out Librewolf, but honestly I'm not sure I'd use it effectively given that I'm not actually in a tech field or anything and don't usually tend to get THAT into the details and programming of whatever I'm using

[HoweeOPea]

I do not like this feature. I want to be able to find websites that have been researched by humans - scientists who are specialists in their fields. If I want a generic answer, I will go to a generic website. If I want an AI search, I can go to an AI website.

Suggestion - have a second box, under the general search box, for AI searches. Do not make it the default, primary search result. I have not seen one person who likes the feature.

[lackey]

If it's your search engine, DuckDuckGo lets you do this by prefixing your query with "!chat". It also protects your privacy from these companies by proxying your queries through their own servers, making it harder for AI companies to track you. 

Mozilla did none of this, despite rushing this feature out to release. 

[neutronstar87]

So.. you didn't even try out the feature. It is not even close to that. There's no AI search toolbar. It doesn't take over any of the existing features or UI elements. It's just a very small "✨" button that hovers over a selected text that you can click to open a sidebar equivalent in size to a history or a bookmark sidebar which has your choice of LLM's website open.

This is why I wrote that people are too skittish/volatile in this discussion. I bet most didn't even try the option like you and just assumed the worst and started downvoting.

[SabreWulf1986]

I don't want my mouse cursor icon changed into anything else on any piece of technology, ever.

[Nobody_of_note]

That's not even what concerns a lot of us that work in the industry.

Have you seen how many nuclear projects are being talking about to power more and more powerful models?  Can you maybe think what might be happening right now when we don't have that extra capacity online?  That's right, more fossil fuels to burn!!

Can you not see this toy is contributing in a very real way to the climate crisis we're already suffering from? 

And before some one thinks I'm anti nuclear, I'm not.  It would be amazing if we could produce our entire base load from nuclear and a renewable mix.  Once storage gets to a point that it's truly usable and not some idiotic render of a block stacking tower, we'll be ready for a fully renewable future.

Just because all you see is a button, or a poorly written block of text output doesn't mean there isn't a catastrophic waste of natural resources and extra pollution going on behind your toy.

Ask yourself why people on the inside, below the c-suite are trying to sound the alarm.

[Visnes]

Then make this an extension that is not directly integrated with the browser. That way you have to opt in by *installing* it if you absolutely want to use it..

[marianoguerra]

will this be exposed for js developers? chrome canary experiments with gemini seem to expose a window.ai object you can use to use the capabilities from code.

if so please try to talk to each other and standardize an MVP 🙂

[Mardak]

This current chatbot experiment does not make use of LLM / chat completion-type APIs, but there's a path to building a more integrated Firefox chatbot powered by local or remote inference APIs that could be exposed to developers both for the web and add-ons.

[JHeuser]

Do not do this.

Leave ai out of my browser. If you want to make it put it in an extension. I'd still hate it but at least it won't be forced onto my PC.

[pookarah]

absolutely this. i get that there's probably people who've been asking for this, but please leave it as an official extension. I and many others have zero interest in it, and worry that it will impact the overall security and privacy of our firefox installs.

[soraka]

i absolutely do not want this. not as an extension, not in the browser. i think less of the company for even starting this process. you can and should end it now. generative ai is extremely unethical, with high environmental cost, scraping data usually without consent or compensation, and often unhelpful results.

[nousernames]

Exactly. You will lose so many of us if you pursue this.

[hadtoregister]

Oh no. Under what circumstances can Firefox be trusted at that point? How can we trust that it won't be given access to our usage data even if it's "turned off" (re: invisible to the user but still scraping data)? This just sounds like Google all over again.

[mcortt]

AI in sidebar is great. However, please give us some sort of keyboard shortcut to open it.

[Mardak]

Does it need to be a keyboard shortcut or would a dedicated button to click be good for now? There's a lot of existing keyboard shortcuts, so having one for each sidebar might be too many, but could a keyboard shortcut to toggle / reopen the last opened sidebar work too?

[mcortt]

The main goal of a web browser is to browse the web, not browse the browser UI, which is what I feel a specific button accomplishes. The button would work (the sidebar toggle button is what I currently use), but there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle it currently that I am aware of. Personally, I would prefer a keyboard shortcut for the AI chat specifically, but I am also of the thought that most things should have keyboard shortcuts, or at least be able to be assigned a keyboard shortcut (a la extension shortcuts). Though, I understand where that could be a lot of work.

My preferences in order:

• Assignable keyboard shortcut to AI, synced tabs, etc
• Keyboard shortcut for sidebar toggle
• Button to open it

For now I would settle and be happy with a keyboard shortcut to toggle the sidebar to its last state.