this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
152 points (100.0% liked)

Firefox

5 readers
25 users here now

The latest news and developments on Firefox and Mozilla, a global non-profit that strives to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Related

Rules

While we are not an official Mozilla community, we have adopted the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines as far as it can be applied to a bin.

Rules

  1. Always be civil and respectful
    Don't be toxic, hostile, or a troll, especially towards Mozilla employees. This includes gratuitous use of profanity.

  2. Don't be a bigot
    No form of bigotry will be tolerated.

  3. Don't post security compromising suggestions
    If you do, include an obvious and clear warning.

  4. Don't post conspiracy theories
    Especially ones about nefarious intentions or funding. If you're concerned: Ask. Please don’t fuel conspiracy thinking here. Don’t try to spread FUD, especially against reliable privacy-enhancing software. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show credible sources.

  5. Don't accuse others of shilling
    Send honest concerns to the moderators and/or admins, and we will investigate.

  6. Do not remove your help posts after they receive replies
    Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 46 points 2 months ago (15 children)

People hate the term AI and so Mozilla were always going to struggle with providing modern functionality, as let's face it, the Internet is embracing AI whether we like it or not

There's AI in many forms in Firefox such as how it predicts the page you want to revisit from the address bar and translates content locally on device. If these AI capabilities were moved to extensions, it would probably significantly reduce the benefit users get from Firefox and likely prevent other useful features such as privacy preserving AI alternatives.

This is poignant. AI as we know it is basically what we were calling machine learning a couple years ago. The same people that are very vocally complaining about the advent of a smarter browser, are the same people that bemoan Mozilla for depending on Google for financing. Somehow they want a browser that only the most devout privacy evangelists would use and they want a browser that is self-sustained through diverse deals, none of which they're able to see or feel.

I feel like there's a lot of disingenuous Firefox supporters who want a utopia browser and refuse to allow Mozilla to do anything to evolve the browser. These same people talk up all the Firefox forks and that change a few defaults and yet bemoan everything Mozilla does that makes those forks possible. It's boring.

  • I want a browser with on device translations.
  • I want a browser with smart page suggestions.
  • I want a browser that's able to summarise articles.
  • I want a browser that can fact-check pages.
[–] meatlotion@mas.erb.pw 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

@sabreW4K3 why don't you fork Firefox to do all those unnecessary for everyone else things? Firefox needs to stay unbloated, unAI'd, and most importantly sincere to it's original intents.

"I want a browser that can fact-check pages" 🤣 AI cannot fact check itself let alone anything else. Why don't you do your own fact checking?

My £0.02

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

Firefox needs to stay unbloated, unAI’d, and most importantly sincere to it’s original intents.

[citation needed]

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

cannot fact check itself let alone anything else. Why don't you do your own fact checking?

Why don't I render my own CSS? Firefox has the ability to pull alternative sources in the background and compare against my current page. What is wrong with that?

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's... Challenging. Like the pet eating thing, there are many sources saying it's true and many saying it's false. Official sources can lie (Russia came to mind for no reason whatsoever), so we rely on sources we already trust, which is tricky and even subjective.

I imagine that "if in Fox then False" is a good start, but aside from that I can only think it getting extra sources, also a challenge without real time web crawling of the internet, were google and Microsoft are already light years ahead.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But if Mozilla can, for example create a sources list and even charge for the ability to be a default on said sources list, wouldn't that be a double win? The problem with things being unreliable can be dealt with via language. Like big red text saying don't trust this blindly.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago

They can also do intelligent searching and simply surface links.

Do I trust LLM summaries? Not fully. But how about the strategy used by an app like BeyondPDF for Mac:

Think: Firefox does the search, then gives you the sources and the most likely relevant excerpts from each. Consequences of it searching wrong? A small waste of time, but no misinfo.


Sidebar!

One can be against environmental costs of great machine-learning powered search, and offended by the arguable IP theft that created the tools, but it’s unlikely all those who say they “don’t want AI anything!” really mean that entirely.

“I don’t want or need the current version of ChatGPT for my use cases” is very fair though. Maybe they don’t have any SQL queries or Excel formulas - on the edge of their abilities - to build, or text to beautify, or quirky esoteric philosophy to bounce off a robot…

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pay to be the "truth" on a fact checking tool? Fox news is very interested.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 points 2 months ago

Aren't Google and Bing and others paying to be featured in Firefox. What's the difference?

load more comments (12 replies)