[gkbrk]

Because people like chat bot sidebars.

My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that people who use chatbot sidebars in other applications would also want one in their browser.

ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?

[mort96]

Should Firefox build in a separate side bar for every popular website? Would you want a Facebook side bar and Facebook account integration?

I wouldn't.

[gkbrk]

The way users use Facebook and LLMs are so massively different, it almost seems like a bad faith argument to equate them.

Facebook is mostly scrolling the timeline and passive consumption. It doesn't benefit from being on the side because the content you interact with on Facebook is completely separate from the content on your other tabs.

In contrast, LLMs have ongoing conversations that the user can come back to, and each conversation might relate to multiple tabs that the user is working on. On top of that, it's a very common occurrence that the user has questions about, or a task to be done using the content of the current page. This makes LLM and chatbot integration much more useful than a Facebook integration.

Also if you have the Facebook Messenger installed, Firefox already gives you an integration to share things with your Facebook contacts.

[sunaookami]

Funfact: Firefox already had a Facebook sidebar and integration back in 2012! https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-introduces-new-s... The Social API was later removed though because it was wildly unpopular (unrelated but man look at the good macOS and Firefox design in the screenshot...)

[mort96]

Haha, that's so typical Mozilla. Proves my point I suppose.

[godelski]

They kinda already do. Google is built in, just search right in there url bar. You also got DDG, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, EBay? They make it easy to add YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if you could add Facebook.

And like every browser does that. It's been that way for like over a decade...

[mort96]

Okay, and? Is anyone complaining about being able to search your favorite search engine from within Firefox?

Do you genuinely think this is comparable to Facebook integration? Do you believe that it Mozilla announced Facebook account integration and a Facebook side bar tomorrow, people's reaction to that would be, "oh this is just like what they did with search, this is fine"?

If not, isn't your comment a tiny bit disingenuous?

[godelski]

  > My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day.

Even as a vim user I don't get why an AI chat bot shoved into an IDE is endlessly praised while an optional hidden chatbot in a browser is treated like some grave insult. Last I checked, OpenAI was the 5th most visited website. No one complained that browsers made it easier to interface with the most popular website (Google) by directly typing into the url bar. FFS you can also do that with the 8th most popular website, Wikipedia.

I seriously don't understand why everyone is upset about that. Do what I do and just don't open it or interact with it. No one is making you use it. It's trivial about if bytes because it's literally just a wrapper. So it doesn't affect you, why let it live rent free in your head and make you angry? Just sounds like you're looking for things to complain.

[mort96]

I ... am not convinced that the people who praise Microsoft for shoving Copilot into VS Code are the same people who criticize Mozilla for shoving ChatGPT into Firefox

Personally I dislike both, and VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code.