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Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month (www.techspot.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 46 points 4 months ago* (10 children)

Avoid forcing AI to its users? I switched to WaterFox just to avoid it.

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  • [–] 40 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

    While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.

    Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.

    And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.

    Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.

    In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    I think it's a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people's friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there's a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of "been around" the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users' search data.

    What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don't think "more AI" is the right answer, but I also don't know what I would do in their position. It's a tight spot.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.

    Yeah.

    I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.

    But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.

    I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Personally I use the chatbot side panel once in a while, it doesn't get too much in the way while doing something else.

    But all the other features using a small trained model are legit nice (translation, image captioning) and thankfully all optional.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    I mean, I’ve been messing with LLMs before Llama 1. I don’t hate chat bots in general. But I found the sidebar kind of stupid. It didn’t feel like a smart model when I tried, it didn’t have knobs to tune, and literally everything has a chatbot anyway.

    There are cool Firefox forks built as “agenic browsers” to interact with LLMs in a structured way. But I think they should be just that: separate. A different program to open when you want an LLM messing with your browsing, with all the security hazards that entails.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Yeah it is. My friends think I'm 90 years old because I use "that old 90s browser, what a weirdo!"

    I actually doubt the majority of people nowadays know what a browser is and how it differs from the OS or other applications

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago*

    Do a fresh install of Firefox sometime and keep track of all the places Mozilla shoves AI into your face. The notifications, the sidebar, and coming soon: even the window type. Begging to use AI to group your tabs. Begging to summarize the article you just found that was actually written by a person.

    You'd figure Chrome would be the worst offender here, but they own the Google search engine, and that's mostly enough for them. A fresh Firefox install comes across as maximalist as Microsoft Edge these days.

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