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!

[qu1j0t3]

It's worse than "a solution looking for a problem". 

It's a non-solution that is creating and exacerbating very serious problems. It's unacceptable. Mozilla will destroy their brand if they continue to humour LLM and generative garbage.

[Zefram]

You can really see the frantic race to try and make this technology ubiquitous and indispensable before the law can catch up. The think if they can make this into something "too big to fail" then the powers that be will just throw up their hands.

[mega]

Did an AI write this?

[JPLeBreton]

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@Mardak wrote:

, so perhaps competition and innovation will help make these systems less of a black box and improve on many other aspects like privacy as well.

---

Without putting aside all the social-political objections I have to LLMs (which others have articulated many of well in this thread), this is pure "faith in markets" wishful thinking of the kind that has led Mozilla down dead end alleyways in the past. By building conduits from the for-profit LLMs into Firefox you are strengthening the position of those players, which already have large advantages over open source LLMs. Even if they "have no moat", simply insisting that open source will win in this space when the most fundamental terms of the game have been set by those with the most capital to wield is naive and ahistorical.

Strategically this feature seems like it is more about Mozilla executive FOMO, avoiding getting left behind, than doing the most good for the most users and reaching new users who might be fleeing the Chrome monoculture. Right now Firefox needs to restore trust, and LLMs are a technology with major trust concerns on multiple fronts. As you can see in this thread, giving OpenAI (a company with notoriously untrustworthy leadership) real estate in your core browser functionality is creating rather than answering privacy questions, and saying "well if the privacy concerns are real then the market will sort it out"... oof. The market has provided ample evidence that the best-capitalized players will utterly crush Firefox in any way they can. So this seems like preemptively conceding defeat to what is increasingly clearly a bubble, and the only viewpoint I can imagine to whom it's not is one that just thinks LLMs are neat and cool and the (unavoidable) future, with no actual downsides... which is an embarrassing position for champions of the open web. The world is something we make.

[xenianth]

ignoring the extensive and knowledgeable criticism to take jabs at others who didn't write in the same way by shilling said chatbots. this is patronizing and disrespectful to both the OP and others who don't write in a way you like.

[CharlieBo]

Rude.

[doodlemancy]

The dismissiveness and arrogance with which you responded to this very smart, very thoughtful person, who gave you their time and a lot of things to think about, is honestly sickening.

[Sintanity]

"Thank you for your actually thoughtful feedback! Allow me to read none of it, take none of it in, and reply by implying you agree that AI can be good." Bruh

[jseakle]

Hey Mardak,

Reading your responses here, it's clear that you've put a lot of love into this feature and that your heart is in the right place. I know you're getting a lot of angry pushback and it's probably causing you to go on the defensive. People are reacting strongly because they are *scared*, and maybe in some cases that makes them think you are evil, but you're not. You're just coming from really different places.

So I want to ask you really genuinely & kindly to take a step back and consider the bigger picture with fresh eyes. Chatbots are cool and will definitely help people. But at the same time, with a userbase the size of Firefox's, it's not a question of whether it will say something deeply racist, dangerous, or misleading, nor even of when — it's a question of how many times per day and does Mozilla get sued over it and whether anyone dies as a result. No matter how well you try to filter your output, some child is going to be instructed in how to use the stove (even correctly!) and end up causing a gas fire. A Palestinian is going to be told that their people are not experiencing a genocide. Someone making a website is going to given code with a SQL injection in it and lose everything, including maybe other people's credit card information or medical records. Even the attempts to prevent issues like these create more issues — by trying to enforce "neutrality" in responses, you end up explicitly endorsing the status quo on issues where Mozilla has no business endorsing anything.

This tool just isn't ready yet. It can do so many cool things, when used by people who know what they are signing up for and take responsibility in seeking it out on their own. But putting it inside a web browser where everyone will see it without asking, including children, the elderly, the new-to-computers, etc. is simply irresponsible. Please hold off for now.

Thank you.

[Obligada]

Respectfully, I’d argue that people who object to this ai feature are not scared. We are angry. We are frustrated at seeing this pointless, actively harmful technology being added to a web browser that we believed we could trust with our privacy. In a general sense yes, I am scared of AI’s impact on the environment and how practically everyone involved in pushing it seems to ignore or laugh off these concerns. This is actively making the world a worse place and for what? 

I’ve read as many replies as I could, and I’ve yet to see an explanation as to why this is being implemented, let anyone anything resembling an actual answer to our objections and concerns. Calling it “scared” seems to imply our rejection of this feature is irrational. It isn’t. So many people have eloquently argued against it and we get nothing but silence. 

[dhasenan]

---

@Mardak wrote:

Not everyone has your skill nor background to participate in these discussions. There's potential for these free and readily available AI chatbots to help many others universally and inclusively share their ideas and concerns.

In other words, you want someone who has a bad feeling about something to consult an LLM to generate some text objecting to the idea. The text will not reflect their knowledge (they don't have it) and it won't reflect the LLM's knowledge (it doesn't actually know things, it just repeats text similar to what it's seen). The LLM draws on text that was seen in similar contexts, but there might be salient differences (for instance, a different browser might send text to an online service for translation whenever you highlight it on the page; if there was a lot of discussion about that, the LLM is likely to draw from those discussions in its generated text).

This is not productive. I'm quite certain you do not in fact want to read hundreds of comments like this. It is much more productive for someone to realize they don't know that much about the situation and either not comment at all or educate themselves before commenting.

I hope you are being paid handsomely to promote this, because otherwise it would just be sad.

[lucideer]

> Thanks for the thoughtful feedback that many might have trouble writing up.

Frisk clearly put a lot of time & effort into that detailed & considered post & you've completely disrespected their thoughtful feedback by replying with disingenuous & meaningless marketing buzzwords. Your second paragraph is also extremely condescending - have you considered the possibility that may not have the "skill nor background to participate in these discussions".

[everentropy]

So what I'm hearing from this response is you only want to listen to users who can give you a small essay, and not listen to he overwhelming sentiment that people don't want this. Really makes me feel valued as a user.

[Vanastar]

Why does the AI ecosystem need greater diversity? What does that look like, and why do you think it is a good thing?

[MageBunkshelf]

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@Mardak wrote:

Not everyone has your skill nor background to participate in these discussions. There's potential for these free and readily available AI chatbots to help many others universally and inclusively share their ideas and concerns. Indeed, there's a lot of potential greatness in these tools as well as responsibility in how they get used.

---

So this tool is supposed to be for people with not much knowledge on technology? The kind of people who won't know that, as you yourself said elsewhere here, the AI responses are "correctly" not to be trusted? You yourself said that here, and now you're saying the intended demographic is people who lack the skill and background understand it?

This is why it should be an extension and not built into the browser itself: you should not be throwing a mass audience who doesn't have the skill or background to understand what AI is or what it does at a machine that hallucinates false "facts", plagiarises scraped data, and is not to be trusted. The reason you're getting this backlash is because this reads incredibly strongly as corporate selling out the browser at the expense of the actual Firefox userbase because the sequel to NFTs wants some advertising. Frankly this debacle is a good-will nightmare for Mozilla, and I'm shocked you still went ahead with it after the response you got back in June.

[Mallow]

---

@Frisk wrote:

Hello!

With introduction of even more AI services to Firefox I wanted to express that to me it does seem like Firefox is missing with development of features. This sentiment is echoed by a lot of people in my social bubble of technologists, ethicists and other people with same priorities as what one could think are values which Firefox was built on.

Those concerns are in my opinion very valid. The machine learning models have shown to be unreliable - just some of the recent examples from AI products made by large corporations: pointing users to eat pizza with glue, providing false information about just about anything. There are a number of ethical issues yet to be resolved with usage of AI, from its intense usage of computing resources that adds up to electric grid demands. Through privacy and possible copyright violations of datasets that power the models. To an entire bag of other issues monitored by excellent resources such as AIAAIC repository. 

AI/Machine learning is an amazing field with many likely applications, and yet, its recent rise to fame is characterized by failures and issues in many implementations. Personally I often don't even see whether the application of AI is truthfully necessary, in many cases a human would do a more trustworthy and fast task of information gathering than a large machine learning model.

When we compare current state of "AI", does it reflect what Firefox stands for? Does it reflect Mozilla's principals?

Let's compare.

• Principle 2

  The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.

LLMs are known for being a black box. Depending on our definition of "open and accessible", LLMs can be a very free resource or a completely inaccessible black box of math.

• Principle 4

  Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

It's clear that LLMs pose a privacy risk to Internet users. LLMs pose risk in at least two ways - because the data they are trained on sometimes contains private information due to negligent training process. In this case users of a learned model can possibly access private information. The second risk is of course usage of 3rd party services that may use information to infringe on privacy of users. While Mozilla in blog assures that "we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox", it's unclear how supporting such services as "ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral" helps protect Firefox user privacy. Giving users choice should not compromise their safety and privacy.

• Principle 10

  Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

In my opinion in the process of designing AI functionalities on top of Firefox there was no evaluation on how those functionalities can benefit the public. There are a number of issues as mentioned above with the LLMs, they can be dangerous and work in detriment to users. Investing and supporting in technology of this type may lead to terrible consequences with little actual benefit.

In addition Mozilla claims:

• We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.

I argue that AI models are the opposite to that. AI output is not verifiable. They are working against sharing knowledge by making seemingly accurate information that turn out to be false.

I ask Mozilla to reevaluate impact of AI considering all of those points. I ask on behalf of myself as well as many users that I see on Fediverse being greatly worried and frustrated with AI changes added on top of Firefox. There is certainly a lot of potential greatness that could be done with AI, but those steps must be taken responsibly.

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Not just that, AI training actively incentivizes not just web scraping which we've already seen, but also harvesting data which is ostensibly private such as on "cloud" services like drop box, and potentially, call me paranoid, directly off your file system. Microsoft and OpenAI already have ties, I'm not saying it's currently happening, but OpenAI and every other AI company already have a "do first, ask for permission second" stand with all data harvesting.

If you want an example of precedent, Adobe are apparently using data on Adobe's cloud service for AI training.

[narazamsa]

If its on device only and no data collection is going to happen. Also only complete opensource models. Then yes that would be good to have.

[Mardak]

Are there any particular open source models that you would recommend for running on device? You might be able to set it as a custom provider to chat directly from Firefox.

[IBBoard]

I think you missed @narazamsa 's point. This would only be good to have if the list was exclusively open source, on-device models. Not ChatGPT. Not Claude. No public models. No for-profit companies scraping the Internet and collecting your data. Only local models. And only ethical models.

(And even then, I don't personally see the point of adding this within the browser - there is no clear use case that doesn't end up at "and then we include the kitchen sink")

[benlk]

Firefox already provides integrations with for-profit third-party companies who are incentivized to scrape the Internet: it ships with built-in support for Google and Bing's search engines.

But agreed: this proposed AI integration seems like something which should better be packaged as an optional, installable, first-party extension, not as something built into the browser. If the extension requires access to APIs not currently available to extensions, then Firefox should make those APIs available to extensions, not privilege one specific use case or developer above all others.

[ilikefirefox99]

I love the features being implemented, BUT... as many point out, a second sidebar  is necessary. The idea should be same as all other browsers. You have a vertical panel with your vertical tabs in the left, and you have the sidebar (history, bookmarks, etc, etc, etc) on the right.

Trying to create a single sidebar that also has your vertical tabs on it, it's a very messy concept and a terrible poor implementation in my view. I understand that it might be tricky to implement this feature, but honestly, it's very very very necessary.

No need to reinvent the wheel, Vivaldi, and especially Microsoft Edge, already show  you the best concept:

Thank you.

[0x4d6165]

if you're gonna use AI crap anyway why not just use edge lol

[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.

[Mardak]

The latest Nightly 130 (20240726152430) has an initial exploration of custom prompts that you can activate from about:config with `browser.ml.chat.shortcuts` (to get the text selection popup) and `browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom` (to get the input box).

Is this something like what you were thinking?

[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 does come with Firefox, but 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

[lackey]

I thought maybe if they really wanted to bundle this into the browser, that it should simply be an extension that can be deleted. The same way Pocket and Fakespot were previously just extensions.

[ffffff]

Not a big fan either, but in fairness, working directly with the browser is probably quite the shortcut and may allow access to functionality that extensions aren't able to use, for better or for worse, leading to a more unified design and user experience on the whole. I like the translations being built-in instead of an extension. If I liked the AI stuff, I'd probably prefer it this way as well.

[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.

[lackey]

My greatest concern is that Mozilla is engaging in this at all, wasting precious employee time and resources on a feature that users didn't request. I realize you probably had nothing to do with this, but I hope whoever made that decision gets to see the community outcry. 

I think others have expressed my lesser concerns better, such as saying that LLM models abandoned privacy for the people whose data they scrape, which goes against the Mozilla manifesto (that privacy must not be treated as optional, in a way that is not limited to the users of a particular browser). Sure, users can download a pre-compiled language model, but the sourcing of that model also needs to be ethical, which is something that Mozilla has realized and attempted to do in the past with their Common Voice project.

Mozilla is at its best when it's creating trends, not following them. Microsoft and Google are going to win at the big data game. They always have. And that's all AI is.