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!

[QQueso]

strongly, strongly, STRONGLY against AI and chatbot inclusion to Firefox. They're inaccurate, their energy requirements are bad for the environment, and frankly they're just useless outside of a research setting.

[fournm]

Incredibly strong disapprove, to the point of setting up a Connect account.

[shatteredsword]

honestly mozilla is lucky that firefox doesn't really have any competition when it comes to privacy-based browsers. This would have been the end of it otherwise, and I'm not sure that they realize it.

[haingdc]

Thanks. But don't waste time for these comment like this

[Tatra]

Thanks. But don't waste time for these comment like this.

[Noaiplease]

I do not want generative AI included in Firefox in any way. Not only do I find generative AI to be morally questionable at best, it is a feature that is often incorrect and actively worsens the user experience. If it is added in full I will be considering switching search engines.

[askabaz]

Can you also provide DuckDuckGo AI Chat (https://duck.ai/ or https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Duck+Assist&ia=chat)? I tried to implement it by modifying the string "browser.ml.chat.provider" but it doesn't work.

Edit: I tried to set "browser.ml.chat.provider" to "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=&ia=chat&bang=true": It works but it is very easy to get the error "Search query entered was too long. Please shorten and try again.".

[geekley]

DDG AI Chat weirdly doesn't work if the search query ("q=" part in the URL) is empty. On a quick test, it seems to work for me setting it to https://duck.ai or https://duckduckgo.com/aichat.
The layout is slightly broken (weird horizontal scrollbar) but that seems to be DDG's fault, not Firefox.

EDIT: I see what you mean now. If I ask it to summarize info for example, I get that error message too. I don't know if there's a way to make it work by editing the config strings... 🤔

[1AndDone]

My only feedback about AI is that I want it kept off my computer. I think that it is important to verify the exact sources and dates of information that I find in my searches. AI does not do that, so it is useless to me. If Mozilla fully rolls out AI in the future, I hope that it continues the option in Firefox settings to let users keep it turned off.

[geekley]

Please add DuckDuckGo AI Chat as well (https://duck.ai/ or https://duckduckgo.com/aichat/).
It's an option that claims to respect privacy. It also has multiple providers to choose from, currently GPT4o mini, Claude, Llama, Mixtral (these last 2 seem to be open source).

[geekley]

1. Please let us set a custom provider in a way that we can switch options without losing the URL. Currently, if I select another option, the custom URL I set is lost. Even better, let us add multiple custom providers in the UI, assigning both name and URL for each entry, so it shows that name instead of "Custom provider (URL)".
2. Why can't I right click stuff in the sidebar, like e.g. selected text to copy it, search, etc?
3. You could have a "pop-out" button in the sidebar that moves it to a regular tab (without reloading the page) in case someone wants to continue the chat with more space.
4. In addition to the sidebar close button, you could have a hide button that closes it without unloading the page. So you can continue with the chat history where you left it upon showing the panel again.
5. It would be nice to have a setting to hide the switch provider dropdown. Or you could collapse it into an image button in the area above it, next to the close button, to avoid wasting vertical space.

[Aewin]

Mozilla has talked a big game about 'ethical AI' but the AIs listed include the biggest offenders in terms of negative environmental impact and content theft, so this move makes me question their dedication to ethical AI (as well as their ethical stances in general).

I'd like to ask Firefox to either remove the AI features entirely or provide an alternative download with them completely missing from the browser code. I have myriad ethical and legal concerns about AI and the writing that I share online, and I will need to postpone the update and find another browser to switch to if I can't be assured that nothing is scraping my text. I can only be assured of that if no AI features are integrated into the browser at all.

[pascalin]

I tried it with ChatGPT, but I find the interface a bit obtrusive. I don't want that everytime I highlight some text Firefox displays an annoying icon next to my highlight. I think that behavior should be restricted to when I have the Chatbot sidebar activated.

[Doug7070]

I am opposed in the strongest possible terms to any sort of contemporary generative AI products or features being integrated into Firefox by default. This includes LLMs, diffusion models, or any derivatives based on the same methods or provided in whole or in part by any companies in the current market space for such products.

The ethical ramifications of the current glut of AI products are dire and reach fundamentally to the core of the technology as currently implemented, and I am extremely disappointed that Mozilla would even consider choosing to integrate any form of these products by default. I have ceased the use of multiple pieces of software entirely due to the pointless integration of AI chatbots and other similar "features", and I would very much prefer that Firefox not join that list by chasing the current market trend of dubiously useful AI bloat and its innumerable ethical transgressions at every stage of development and deployment.

To be absolutely clear: I do not care if an LLM is provided by a company or group that claims to respect privacy or an open-source ethos, I do not care if the LLM runs entirely locally and transmits no data to any external server, I do not care what excuses are made by the people peddling these products about their ethical "guardrails", this entire field of software is as it stands currently a poisoned well, and I will not condone or tolerate its use in the software I use on my systems or recommend to others.

If Mozilla does insist on making these integrations available, they should be as optional addons to be installed by users seeking that functionality, not packaged with Firefox by default.

[atiredinsect]

pls stop ai is a scam that does nothing but steal pls let it fail instead of making it worse : (

[hadley]

Yay, more AI slop.

about:config, set browser.ml.chat.enabled to false for anyone else who doesn't want the "plagiaraism as a service" engine embedded into their browser.

[McBoat]

It's great - on desktop I wish it would immediately set focus to the chatbot prompt whenever I open the sidebar. Keyboard shortcuts are also appreciated.

[madcaker]

Kindly keep this garbage out of my browser please. I think you're forgetting who your primary user-base is. Hint: it's not the AI techbros

[llliiimmmeee]

There is a reason it is opt-in, I swear to goodness... how hard is it to understand!

[MageBunkshelf]

Opt-in would be if this were an extension. I do not opt-in to having an AI "feature" being added to my browser.

[umno]

I literally made a connect account after I got Update 130. I simply do not want any generative AI in my supposedly "privacy-focused" browser at all, actually. Not even if it is just a built-in way to access chatbots. You keep saying "your data won't be saved by Mozilla" but what about all the data the LLMs have scraped? Doesn't that count?

[dotnsau]

Adding AI chatbots to browsers is a great idea, but you should do it the way Brave browser did. It's probably the only browser that did it sensibly, by displaying an option like "Ask Leo" while typing in the search bar. Similarly, here there should be an option to choose a default chatbot in the settings, and then when typing in the search bar, we should see options like "Ask ChatGPT", "Ask Google Gemini", etc., depending on the chatbot we chose as the default. Of course, I believe that eventually, such an option should be built-in by default, and then we can disable it in the settings, not the other way around

[llliiimmmeee]

Mozilla has made it very clear that they are going to stick to opt-in for the foreseeable future, and I respect that decision. AI should always be optional.

[shelley]

So I guess it will just put the chatbots page side by side in the page that I am currently in? lol

I can probably tweak the source code and change it to any website and it will do the job. 😂

[llliiimmmeee]

The best part of this feature is the highlight menu, because of the auto-prompts and such.
And yes, you can do that, but you could also just make an extension to use it, which is publicly available, much easier to write, and much easier to distribute. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Sidebars

[ricspce]

I really like the recent implementation of the chatbot. I would recommend creating a direct shortcut to AI resources in the toolbar, so that when you hover the mouse it shows options similar to what appears when you select text, but here the whole page would be taken into account.
It would be nice to introduce the organization of several open tabs with one click, as well as adding the shortcut to perplexity as a search engine.

[ggdupont]

any chance to add perplexity.ai in the list of LLMs?
any opportunity to add local model like a Llama3.1 with gpt4all?

[nokko]

Firefox Team, please remove any features that encourage the pillaging of the Web from your product, including this “AI Services Experiment.”

Before 2020, people who published creative work on the Web did so knowing that it was publicly accessible — that’s the point of the Web — and that it would be impractical, if not impossible, to track down people ripping off their work to make T-Shirts on Redbubble, print-on-demand Amazon books, and highly-upvoted Reddit reposts. The risk of getting taken for a ride by an anonymous and unprincipled scraper was small and most people wouldn’t bother trying to rip small creators’ stuff.

Then came the GPT-3 project and a raft of other LLMs. GPT-3 itself was trained on Common Crawl, WebText2, and Wikipedia, data from the open web. Billions of words’ worth of scraped text was put into the model while none of the original authors had given OpenAI express permission to train their stochastic parrot on their work. They couldn’t have given permission, as there was no widespread awareness of the technology.

99% of the LLM projects come about just like GPT-3. They rely on ingesting enormous quantities of data from the open web to train their models, give nothing back to the original authors, and occasionally make a tidy profit from the venture.

From the Mozilla Manifesto:

---

2. The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
5. Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on the internet.
10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

---

We agree that the Internet is a global public resource that benefits humanity. LLMs trained on scraped data are an abuse of that resource without the consent of its users. In the feature as-shipped, you include the option to use one of ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, or Le Chat Mistral LLMs. All of these models use publicly-available data. Now, many organizations dodge questions about how they source their data, because none of them ask for permission from the authors of the work they scrape.

The law is not settled on whether this is legal, but it’s obviously immoral. These models do not serve the public benefit and serve to undermine individuals’ ability to shape the Internet. By including this feature, you are encouraging the pillaging of the Open Web.

I am a longtime Firefox user and made this account to comment on this issue, that’s how much this means to me. I hope you see the raft of negative feedback on this matter and change your direction accordingly.

[dedreamer]

Nobody wants this. Firefox uses too many resources on my computer as is, the last thing I want is AI wasting more of them. The whole reason I use Firefox instead of Chrome is because AI sucks.

[llliiimmmeee]

That is why it is optional, my friend.

[llliiimmmeee]

(Opt-in, to be specific, a much better policy than opt-out or forced.)

[Sztefa001]

It's not optional or opt-in or whatever, that would mean it's like an extension you can add, not an already-in-just-choose-from-menu thing. Even then it would be unethical as it would be Mozilla saying "hey, if you wanna steal from others and waste resources there's a handy littel AI addon we have!"

What we're being proposed rn is the exact same tbh, just worse 'cuz it's not a true opt-in.

[Liz]

**bleep** dude you are really hell bent on your bootlicking, huh?

[SoliTheFox]

I want this.

The feature is basically a "fork" of the official sidebar extension, so it is the same as another tab open. There's no "AI" "wasting resources" in the background.

The feature is opt-in, and even if opted-in, is only used when you actually want to use it (select text and click on a button, then it opens the sidebar on the selected provider). If you don't opt-in, select a provider, select some text and click on a button, it is not using a single bit of extra ram, or CPU.

Really recommend actually reading about and maybe exploring stuff before hating on it for free, buddy

[Sztefa001]

Pretty sure the issue about resources is not about one's specific PC but rather AI engine servers that waste a lot of water to cool down and being generally bad for environment. It's not about CPU, it's about Earth.

[llliiimmmeee]

Hi! I love this feature. It's insanely helpful. Things I think could be improved:

• ChatGPT, which I've been using, starts a new chat every time I use the button that appears when you highlight text. I would prefer if there was a toggle to change this behavior.
• Although a complete overhaul, I think it would be nice to have an option for people with OpenAI API keys to use a more firefox-like user interface.
• I would prefer if I could add my own custom prompts to the highlight menu from preferences.
• I think that a button to minimize the chat until I press a sparkles button next to Firefox View would be amazing.

Here are some things I hope you keep the same:

• Opt-in rather than opt-out.
• Using the sidebar rather than opening a new tab.
• The option to keep it in the context menu rather than when I highlight text.
• The variety of different chatbots (I hope that this will expand to allow more healthy competition to Open(Closed)AI!)

[timbro]

the gemini ai tab is using the wrong google account and wont let me switch it

[Andreslav]

Hello everyone

I liked this feature, in particular, the buttons that appear when you select text.

It is necessary to provide for cases when users use plug-ins (1) with similar pop-up windows. It may be necessary to provide developers with an API to add their icon near the cursor, but for Firefox to decide where it will be displayed.

You can also add the option to disable this pop-up window to the AI settings.

(I haven't read all the messages, so I don't know if it was written about earlier. I'm sorry).

[Unrealgeek24]

Hey, quick suggestion if an AI sidebar ever makes it into an official release of Firefox. For me, it would be helpful to be able to completely turn it off, as other browsers like Edge give you a hard time when trying to turn it off. I personally never use AI, so having a sidebar of some sort taking up space for no reason would be counter intuitive to me. It would be nice and helpful to know that you won't do what Edge did and shove AI down my throat. Note: I'm talking about an official release, I know that right now this sidebar is only an experimental feature and can be turned off or on at any time.

[Starlightwars]

It's already known that these generative "AIs" use massive and detrimental energy usage, the cooling systems also use gallons of water per prompt leading to mass evaporation!
all for a crappy chat-bot
it's just not worth it.