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!

[LesleyK]

Generative AI is environmentally disastrous, ethically indefensible (it relies on stolen materials for training), and worse-than-useless, due to the high number of hallucinations and incoherent results.

I chose to default to Firefox because of all the stupid unethical bloatware built into Chrome and Edge.  Why on Earth to you want to follow them off that cliff?

[wwahammy]

What is wrong with this company? No, no, no,no. Remove it, blow it up and can the executives that think this is a good idea.

[etr]

No AI. It isn't anywhere close to ethical in its training, and isn't a function that will be helpful.

[Friendofferret]

Please don't add AI to Firefox. 

[fdelapena]

TL;DR: Promote non-web centric stuff as extensions instead of polluting preferences

Just use local stuff for things that are helpful and making a great browser private and open: noise cancelling, better speech and video compression, webcam background blurring, text translations, text to speech, missing alt-text generation, speech to text, OCR and the previous combined with translations, including realtime media and RTC bidirectional subtitles and speech dubbing.

However, LLMs as mentioned are wasteful, questionable regarding rights and too broad. Regarding Llamafile, whichever model includes (hopefully something that makes sense) is still slightly tolerable for local-only use but without giving feature focus to make it useful for a browser. Consider suggesting an extension instead for LLM stuff, even for Llamafile, as far as I know there is no web standards that require to cover something with a general purpose LLM chatbot that is worth beyond a marketing trend.

[pyrholidon]

Honestly I'd rather dump mozilla for a browser that doesn't use AI.

[Felix7]

I don't think it's a feature worth having development time allocated to it.

[JustinJMajor]

No and hell no.

No.

[penguinishka]

NO THANK YOU, PLEASE.

[rhylinz]

Whatever happened to "the most privacy-oriented browser"? You are sinking your reputation by adding garbage to be more accessible. Nobody in their right mind wants this.

[Isabelleofnorca]

Generative AIs (large language models) are notoriously buggy and generally not fit for purpose. There's no real reason to add it to a web browser. I understand you want to be on the cutting edge and not be left behind, but consider this: many of the answers Generative AI gives are incorrect. To the extent in can create fiction or pictures on purpose, it largely plagiarize for other people.

There's no point in hitching your wagon to this horse. Sure, I get it. It's a nightly build. Users like myself can turn it off. But here's the thing: there's no need to dedicate resources to it right now. None. The technology just isn't there yet. OpenAI is mostly lying about their product's capabilities and downplaying the harm it's doing. You can always come back to it if (not when, because it's uncertain these technologies will get there) it generative AI starts giving out correct answers, uses less power, and stops plagiarizing.

[Hyacin]

No.

[theSoftestPaw]

I don't need this. I don't want this. The only potential so-called AI had demonstrated is its enormous capacity to harm people, whether by inventing "facts" about poisonous mushrooms it claims are safe to eat, or by optimizing existing biases that further marginalize whole demographics. And by this point in the game you should know that nobody wants this trash, it's a liability, and it offers nothing but enormous harm to the planet we're all stuck together on. I've used Firefox for 20 years and I'd like it to stay the good browser, but if you implement this crap I'm gone.

[patfrench2]

NO

[AlloyedClavicle]

No. Bad Mozilla. Do not do this.

[ULTROS_PRO]

please stop putting ai nonsense and "ad preferences" in firefox, i hate it sooooo much you have no idea, ai is ruining the internet, don't be a part of it you schmucks!!

[circlesquared]

If there are AI shenanigans afoot, I will move to a different browser.

[JudesNoAI]

Oh, God, please NO. Don't do this, PLEASE.

[aintnoway]

Abso-LUTELY not. This is not okay in the slightest. I see the Mozilla twitter account shilling for AI already so it's obvious the direction that things are going, but I can definitely say that people do not have brand loyalty over a WEB BROWSER. You are absolutely going to shred what little bit of good will you've managed to scrounge back up if you go through with this.

[Silbermm]

Don’t add AI

[LyssaLittleBear]

I use Firefox to keep away from this nonsense. Don't try to be Chrome. Be better.

No AI.

[rzgrrr]

Hello! I have been using Firefox since I was 9 years old. I am 26 now. I have never felt the need to comment on Mozilla's forums, not because I am insufficiently tech-savvy, but because Mozilla has always worked pretty seamlessly for me. I feel that this is generally a misconception that tech workers have- that people who do not engage with their forums regularly or provide their feedback regularly are just not intelligent enough to comment on their latest advancements. This is not the case, and actually pretty antithetical to good U/X. I have never felt the need to come on here in the decade plus that I have used Mozilla Firefox BECAUSE things have been good. I have never disagreed with my Firefox user experience. I think that Rocket is kind of an embarrassment, but it's easy to turn off. It has about the same amount of environmental impact as just running a browser does.

AI features are intrusive and obtrusive, by design. This is not something that handwringing design compromises can resolve, which I'm sure are some of the solutions you are about to trot out to something that you have already made your mind up on doing. Here are some examples of how AI has affected my browsing experience.

I currently have to use an incredibly long link on every single Google search just to prevent Google's AI from generating enormous pollutants in order to try to (erroneously) solve my inquiries. I have to carefully watch where I click on the Amazon app so that "Rufus" does not start spewing garbage questions at me while I am trying to shop. Each time I visit a mobile website in everything from banking to pharmacies, I have to make sure not to accidentally touch the speech bubble that will summon the "machine assistant". The speech bubble follows my scrolls, of course, because it wants me to interact with it. It doesn't "want" to solve my problem. The person who designed it wants to desperately justify its existence, and the existence of his job, via the metrics of me even accidentally interacting with the drivel that they have created. I do not understand how tech workers can hear the people around them desperately screaming in their recorded customer service call logs, "PLEASE LET ME TALK TO A HUMAN BEING!!!!", and think, "we need more machines", but I guess that this callous lack of interest in user consent is endemic to Silicon Valley and all of its pale imitators.

I do not want AI features on Mozilla Firefox. I use Mozilla Firefox because it is the browser with the least extraneous, actively user-unfriendly pustules grafted onto it by a group of people whose legacies will be the destruction of all human achievement in the hopes of "surpassing" the need for human input.

I know you will disappoint me. I know you will install these features, and I will keep fleeing them, until there is nowhere else to run. If you are reading this, you do not need something "to hide" to want AI to not be able to find it. Privacy used to be your right. It was eroded away artificially, but by human decisions. All we can do is keep saying no. Not that anyone in tech cares.

[shnoorg]

I will switch to the new servo thing cDc is doing. 

[winterwarburton]

Absolutely not. Of the myriad reasons why so many of us choose Firefox over Chrome, Edge, et al, being free of the current Google and Microsoft AI tomfoolery is a big one. I think it's pretty clear how public opinion is turning on genAI, especially now that it's being shoehorned into everything imaginable. This is not what we want.

[delProfundo]

Feedback is simple. Machine learning pretending to be ai is probably the worst technical advancement of the last decade, and given the decade that says a lot. 

anyone all in on this mess is not taking their role seriously. 

I’ve used Firefox blue for years but the moment you default to installing and enabling AI is the moment you become my permanent enemy.  

the world will remember who blindly foisted half baked ai products on society. And there isn’t one yet that is even 5% baked. 

for shame. 

[gsuberland]

Let me put this in as uncertain terms as I can: if you put LLMs in Firefox, I will find another browser. It's an ethical nightmare that produces noxious information-shaped sludge while burning a hole in the planet, and I want no part in it.

You need to get your priorities sorted. Stop chasing fads - especially fads that consume absurd amounts of energy. Focus on reducing Firefox's energy consumption, not increasing it. Focus on core browser performance and stability.

[winterwarburton]

Good luck with finding an alternative. I can't think of any heavy hitters in the market that aren't already stuffed with it (Edge, Opera) or run by companies eager to stuff it in as soon as they can (Chrome).

[omlt]

We don't care. There's already forks of Firefox that have declared their intention to remove this **bleep**.

We, OVERWHELMINGLY, DON'T WANT THIS **bleep**.

[Qantumentangled]

I use Firefox because I want to view web pages in an environment that I have control over. I like to know that Google isn't watching and selling every website I visit. Having my browser reach out to a cloud AI service without my explicit request is a breach of the trust I've put in Mozilla and the Firefox team regarding my privacy. I don't trust these cloud AI providers and I have no desire for the garbage output they provide anyway.

This sounds like a fabulous idea to put into an extension. Not only would it be entirely OPTIONAL and easily removed, it can also provide a great template for other extensions developers how to properly and safely implement AI connections.

[Rallo]

Begging the Mozilla team to not ruin the last good web browser with this gimmicky garbage.

I do not want an overly engineered keyboard next word predictor in my web browser. I do not want a tool created using a language model trained on the works and posts of other people without permission, by scraping the entire internet and asking nobody's permission to do so. I do not want a tool that is accelerating climate change just to excite investors with a buzzword, like blockchain before it. I do not want a tool that does NOT belong in a web browser in the first place! What possessed you to even think this was a good idea?

I will never use it and I will almost certainly lose faith in Mozilla and abandon firefox after 7 years of using it since the release of Quantum if this happens. This is an absolute deal-breaker for me as a user and every firefox user I know.

[5ynic]

No thanks.

[LordOmlette]

Just to confirm, as long as browser.ml.enable and browser.ml.chat.enabled, no part of our Firefox experience will be tainted with this AI filth, is that correct?

[nub235]

We don't want AI or bullshi studies we want privacy. Firefox hardening and librewolf shouldn't have to exist. But they do because stock Firefox is so unusable

[SeaDragon]

No. This is a waste of money, resources and time.

No one but people in charge that think investors and donors to the project want that are asking for this.

If this continues I’ll migrate to Konqueror exclusively while Firefox rots with things that don’t matter for browsing.

[NoAI]

Every day you use AI integration I look for a new browser. I've been using Firefox since beta.

The second something like Firefox without AI drops I'm GONE.

[emgrasso]

I have been a faithful user of Firefox for many years, on my android devices (where I installed it and used it instead of the defaults) as well as my laptops. I am sorry that your infection by the AI/LLM scam will make it necessary for me to find an alternative.

[NoAI]

I've been using Firefox since the beta version went out to the public. I'm looking for a new browser that's basically Firefox before AI.

[spaceghoti]

Please make sure this remains always opt-in only. If I have to opt out of AI or don't have the option at all, then I will uninstall all Mozilla products and never go back.

[Bobguthrie]

As a pro media artist, whereas AI is creating chaos therein, I would politely suggest "no".

Really, read the room before suggesting such an asinine move. Google Image search is already an useless tool with AI replacing actual imagery, why kneecap Firefox next?.

[no_ai_in_ffox]

Don't want AI in my browser. It's destroying the environment, and haven't you ever heard of AI winter? You could be making the browser more memory efficient, faster, more customizable, more accessible, more protective of user privacy... instead you're chasing fads. Enough. No. Nobody wants this.