[mrklol]

Firefox mentions the following ones:

"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.

- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.

- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.

- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.

- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."

[mort96]

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?

And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?

[wongarsu]

The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2].

This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.

And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...

[squeefers]

> This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022.

show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?

[wongarsu]

2018: "DeepL - AI Assistance for Language" https://web.archive.org/web/20180906040822/https://www.deepl...

2020: "DeepL Pro, released in March of 2018, is our latest product, now allowing subscribers to unlock the full capacity of DeepL’s AI translation technology" https://web.archive.org/web/20200429002724/https://www.deepl...

[squeefers]

are these examples of AI meaning machine translation? because they all have the word translation next to them. not the same thing

[wongarsu]

They are examples of AI being a category that contains (a subset of) translation technology. Which is consistent with Mozilla's use of "you can disable AI, which will also disable translation"

If you are asking about examples of AI being synonymous with machine translation: no, I don't think that was ever a thing. But I also don't think that was claimed

[Volundr]

Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe...

Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.

[squeefers]

i agree, but the guy said AI was a synonym for machine translation long before the currently confused meaning appeared

[Volundr]

I don't think they did, they said machine translation is considered AI, that is, it's the subset of things that are AI. Not that they are one and the same.

[Rexxar]

Here is the "artificial intelligence" part of a French engineering diploma in 2001:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030526120130/http://www.ensta....

There are four courses:

  - Expert Systems
  - Machine Learning
  - Artificial Evolution
  - Cognition and Reasoning

[squeefers]

does that show us that AI meant Machine Learning in 2001?

[input_sh]

IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?

Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.

Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.

[mort96]

Option 3: don't

[input_sh]

Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment.

It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.

[shakna]

Because what people want is not an opt-out, like Mozilla have given, but an opt-in.

This is the grudging half-measure.

Many would have preferred the updates to come with a form asking for on or off. It didn't, so they complained, and this was the answer.

[mort96]

Frankly I don't really even want an opt-in. If Mozilla wants to go build an AI browser, they can do that, but it should be a separate project; don't transition Firefox into being an AI browser. I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", whether through an opt-in option or an opt-out option.

[mort96]

Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?

[input_sh]

"You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it.

Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.

[animuchan]

The need for killswitch I think is self-inflicted.

* Mozilla has a track record of forcing unwanted changes on its users. What with Pocket, data collection and telemetry defaults, sponsored links throughout the UI, all the good stuff.

* The enduring users are more likely to want to revert any Mozilla default the moment it's introduced. (This is why Firefox has disproportionately many projects to un-Mozilla the thing: Arkenfox, BetterFox, LibreWolf, Waterfox...)

This is from the annoying (sure hope so!) sporadic Firefox user who was actually pleased by the news. Honestly, I saw it and though: wow, Mozilla giving the tiniest part of control back to the user, that's actually good! Short-lived as the excitement was, in these fading moments of Firefox I'd like to see more of this and less of the user-hostile thing please.

[throwawayk7h]

I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.

[dormento]

As much as i detest everything about it, i must admit i'm mildly curious as to what workflows people are using it for.

[lynndotpy]

"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart".

If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.

As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.

[AndrewDucker]

They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI:

https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/

[Dwedit]

I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did.

It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.

[jeppester]

> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?

If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.

I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.

[UI_at_80x24]

Could you please describe your use-case? How do you use it? How do you make use of it?

I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there?

Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea.

Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.

[jeppester]

I always have my browser open, so having it just one click away and not interrupting with whatever else the browser is showing feels convenient.

I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.

[Sabinus]

I use it to communicate with AI about content I'm reading without having to navigate away from the content and breaking flow. On a 4k screen there's plenty of horizontal space to have the AI sidebar and display a web page.

[mort96]

Then you can install an AI extension.

[jeppester]

You were saying:

> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar

I answered:

> If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.

Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful.

> Then you can install an AI extension.

As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension.

It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?

[nsvd2]

The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.

[johnnyanmac]

Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.

[stonogo]

Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.

[AdmiralAsshat]

It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.

[sigmar]

LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.

[badsectoracula]

> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."

When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all.

I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.

[skywhopper]

The chatbot providers don’t allow any cleaner integration unless you are using pay-per-request API rates.

[badsectoracula]

This is not a problem for local LLMs though - and AFAIK Firefox does require from you to login to the cloud chatbots, so you'd probably be the one getting charged for it.

[Spixel_]

They all seem like great features.

[mrweasel]

On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear.

Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.

So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.

[pamcake]

You might like Konform Browser. Optional features like that disabled with the nag removed (but local ones can still be enabled in preferences).

https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source

[MallocVoidstar]

I started clicking a 'next page' link before I'd actually finished reading something (so I kept holding the mouse buttown down), and a couple of seconds later Firefox popped up a 'link preview' box informing me that I was clicking on a link to a web forum. Wow, thanks, couldn't have figured that out myself. (It did not actually summarize the next page in any way.)

[techwizrd]

Whoa, I have been looking for AI-enhanced tab grouping for a while. This is actually pretty awesome.